Arctic Breeze USB Desktop Fan Review
Ryan Martin / 12 years ago
Performance
We don’t have a quantitative way to measure the airflow and its performance. However, I can safely say this fan is, like the name suggests, more of a breeze than a wind storm. The reason why it was designed for use as a desktop fan is because it has an effective range of just under 1 metre, after that you can’t really feel the airflow at all.
In my opinion this fan works well if you sit it next to your monitor and behind your keyboard, as for most people that will be about 30-60cm away from them and the fan makes a noticeable difference from that kind of distance. I normally use this fan at maximum speed since you get the best amount of airflow and its not loud at all.
Bigger fans and air conditioning units will always provide more cooling than this unit, but for its size, price and power consumption this unit certainly punches well above its weight.
We took the acoustic measurements 10cm away from the Arctic Breeze using a decibel meter. A silent room was 35 dBA on our meter, so seeing numbers of 48 dBA for maximum fan speed is impressive. It means just a 13 dBA delta compared to the background noise level. I found it is not intrusive at all, you can easily watch video clips, listen to music, play games and even talk over Skype without even noticing the fan is on.
