be quiet! Shadow Wings 2 120mm/140mm Fan Review

Performance

Fan RPM Speeds

As you will have noted in our fan descriptions. Each fan has a ‘box rated’ maximum RPM speed. We first decided to check how these compared with true maximum fan speeds to see if any major discrepancies occurred. Please remember that based on standard fan specifications, a 10% (above or below) variance is often allowable as a ‘margin of error’.

It was a little surprising to see that both of the 140mm fan variants actually operated quite notably higher than the rated maximum speed. The results seen in the 120mm fans (slightly under) is usually what is normally expected. What is, perhaps, the most interesting aspect is that both of the PWM fans did push the 10% margin of error very closely, albeit at different ends of the scale.

As a whole, every fan performed perfectly well in this regard, however, and as such the build quality in the rated speed clearly is both accurate and solid.

Acoustics

The be quiet! Shadow Wings 2 fans were, as the name might suggest, really quiet. They were so quiet in fact that our testing with a standard acoustics noise meter was rendered practically meaningless. Whether the speed was high or low, the fans barely operated across noise level. It is, however, important for us to give you an idea as to just how quiet these are.

In the video below, you show an example of one of the fans running. Now, this is again subjective based on the volume you currently have your speakers at, but to put it into context, at the end of a video I used a ‘clicker’ twice to give you an idea of the comparative noise. In other words, these are super quiet!