"The infamous beige and brown colour scheme of Noctua fans may be “make or break” for some people’s buying preferences, but that hasn’t stopped the Noctua NF-F12s being some of the most respected 120mm fans on the market. Surprisingly, we’ve yet to take a look at the Noctua NF-F12 fans here at eTeknix and today we’ve managed to get some in from Noctua to have a good look at. In an era when consumers are being increasingly more fussy about aesthetics, quality and noise, Noctua have managed to make a name for themselves with the NF-F12s.
We are going to walk you briefly through the Noctua NF-F12 fans and show you how their acoustic performance stacks up against some competing fans. Unfortunately we can’t do any CFM-airflow tests as we lack the expensive equipment to do so, also using proxy measurements like fan performance on CPU heatsinks is a very hit-and-miss process because different heatsinks require different things – some benefit from static pressure, others from high airflow and others from a mix of both. Add to that the fact you can start playing around with single or dual fan configurations, PWM speeds or fixed speeds like 500/1000/1500RPM, different testing environments like cases or open air test benches and suddenly you’ve got more graphs than you can shake a stick at – let alone draw accurate conclusions from."
