Best... sub £10 rad fans. After quiet + SP. PWM or 3 pin is fine

Mercutio · 18 Feb 2017 at 17:28

Generally when asking this in here it's the "best" fan wanted which is usually the wrong side of Noctua's for price.

Assuming a budget of about a tenner a fan (hoping for bulk buy discounts on top) is there any useful suggestions? I'm after a good, quiet, decent static pressure radiator fan, 120mm.

Currently on a mix of the OcUK badged silverstones and all sorts of random pairs. If the silverstones are a good shout, another 6 of those could be quite decent.

Disco_P · 19 Feb 2017 at 09:55

Silveestones are a good shout. I use 8 and am very happy.

pastymuncher · 19 Feb 2017 at 13:05

I currently have these on both my rads and they do a good job. They need to be on a fan controller though because at full speed they are very noisy.

gupsterg · 19 Feb 2017 at 14:14

For PWM fans the Phanteks F120-MP seem a good buy, currently £8.99 on OCuk. Seen Vardar's F4-120ER working out ~£10.50 each if buying at least 2, I think EK have dropped their price on these due to them being sliver/black vs black/black (which the new ones are).

Mercutio · 22 Feb 2017 at 01:13

Already got a good few of the ones mentioned in the first couple.

Question then: If I have them on a PWM splitter board will the "sense" from the PWM on the fan in plug that carries the sense back to the motherboard plug allow the fanspeed to be set nicely on those silverstones? Or is 3 pin always just voltage adjustment? (I'm guessing the later) so it would just run 100% on a PWM splitter?

Basically if I have something like a Gelid 4 to 1 PWM splitter, have a PWM fan in the plug that has the 4th pin and 3 pin fans in the rest, do the 3pins get their speed adjusted according to what the PWM fan sets or do they just run 100% (because they're voltage adjusted instead)?

Disco_P · 22 Feb 2017 at 09:09

They will run at 100%. You'll need to use normal splitters for 3 pin fans

gupsterg · 22 Feb 2017 at 10:32

@Mercutio

Just as other info which you may or may not know.

4 pin fan header gives constant 12V, that's why the 3 pin fan will run at 100%.

As example on PWM fan when mobo/controller via 4 pin header signals fan to run at 25% duty, fan circuitry then for that duty does x pulsing of 12V to have x duty/RPM within it's circuitry.

The PWM fan's circuitry has profile for fan behaviour for x PWM %. So even if you have say same size/RPM spec of PWM fans and mix differing models, their behaviour will differ on same PWM %.

I'm not on WC but air. I wanted my case intake fans to match "behaviour" as CPU cooler's fans. So I used the Gelid 4 in 1 cable to share CPU fan header signal to them all and I used same 140mm PWM fans on intake/CPU cooler.