Review on Noctua NF-S12B Redux-1200 PWM: High Performance 120mm Cooling Fan (Grey) by George Jacobson

I bought two of these to complete my PC case and ensure air is getting in and out. My case is an older NZXT Source 210 and if you are familiar with this case you may know that the front panel has some limited air intakes. So much so that when I first installed these fans (set to full speed because I don't yet have a 4-pin splitter extension cable long enough to add the PWM functionality from the motherboard), the noise levels weren't all that great bad was front panel. However, when I reinstalled the front panel, the noise increased significantly in this case due to the design of the front panel. If you ran those fans at around 60 or 70 percent in the same case, the extra noise would be pretty much negligible. And I mostly blame that on my case, because it's definitely not the best front panel design in the world. I fixed this a bit by removing the faceplate and using scissors to get rid of a lot of the unnecessary plastic barriers that were just blocking airflow. This has helped some with airflow, but the noise level is still a little higher than I would like. However, I knew that having two 120mm fans spinning at 1200rpm wouldn't be as quiet in my case. My main reason for the purchase was that the fans I had were old and of a much lower quality than pretty much any Noctua fan and one of them got very noisy at times and I had to take it off, disassemble it and reinstall it. - Lubricate bearings. I know from experience that Noctua fans are durable and almost never get louder than when new, which is exactly what I want. I want nothing but Noctua fans on my PC and now I have them. The price for them is great. The RPMs are low enough that you can run them at full speed without terrible noise levels, and they're fast enough to move a decent amount of air at that speed. I bought another 120mm fan from Noctua which has 1700rpm at full speed so I really have no choice but to run it in PWM mode. Which is a bit annoying, because the speed never exceeds 900 rpm in PWM mode. That's not what I want (I want at least 1100). So since these budget Noctua fans don't come with low-noise adapters like the more expensive models, it's PWM or buying a fan controller that will give you the exact speed you want. Overall I really couldn't be happier. I'll probably end up buying a four-pin splitter, but I've already hooked them up to the fan controller. I was just hoping to get this fan controller out of my case because it adds a significant amount of wiring.