SilverStone AP123 120mm Case Fan Review

SilverStone’s AP123 fans currently cost £12.20 each. This puts them towards mid-high end range of fans currently available on the market today. I will now try and be concise in explaining the good and bad about these fans. Firstly, for the money we can see the general case fan performance of these fans is pretty good. For 1500RPMs the acoustic performance is competitive too. The main feature of these fans is that they work to reduce audible noise when up close against fan grilles, filters and case vents. We tested this and showed this to be the case using a fan grille on a case side window. So in that sense the SilverStone AP123 fans do exactly what they are supposed to and do it very well.

However, these fans are not perfect in what they offer. Firstly, the flexibility is limited. At 1500RPM you have an RPM that a lot of people would consider too loud. I myself would of liked to see either PWM support or at least one fan speed reducer cable, 1000 and 1500RPM would of been a good offering. Secondly, the multi-coloured cabling that comes from the motor should be concealed – it doesn’t really do anything positive for the overall aesthetics of the product in my opinion. Finally, the choice of colour is a subjective one. I personally have no issues with blue but from a consumer perspective does blue really go with many cases? I think not. Offering black, white or some other more popular colours would most definitely help SilverStone in making this fans more appealing to a broader audience.

The SilverStone AP123 is quite a niche fan. As a general fan, it doesn’t really do anything out of the ordinary – you could fit out your entire case with these fans and the difference between it and another range of 120mm fans would be minimal. However, this fan does succeed very well in dampening the noise effects of fan grilles and side panel fan mounts so if your system has fan grilles/mounts on the side panel then you would most definitely benefit from acquiring one of these fans to fill that mount. That said, the R&D that has gone into these fans to achieve that is very impressive and the AP123 fans definitely deserve our innovation award because of that.

The bottom line is that this fan is excellent under the right circumstances and usage scenarios but could still benefit from some more flexibility to make them more competitive as a general usage fan.

We would like to thank SilverStone for providing these samples for review.