be quiet! Silent Wings 4/Silent Wings Pro 4 120mm Review

Installation and Practicality

Thanks to the multiple corner attachments, the Silent Wings 4/Pro offer an almost unique level of installation customisation. You can, quite literally, set these to perform as optimally as possible for the task you want. If you want better case airflow, there’s a corner fitting for that. If you want stronger static pressure on radiators (ie a tighter fit meaning more powerful airflow), there’s an attachment for that on the Pro variants!

Put simply, there’s something for all needs and requirements here with be quiet! definitely finding a way to make the Silent Wings 4 series offer something genuinely new and potentially very interesting. – Exactly how well do they perform though? Well, with this in mind, we’ve done a little (admittedly rather crude) testing to compare the official figures from the three model variants we have in our possession.

Performance

In regards to our methodology, we’ll freely concede that ‘real world’ figures will rarely reflect those stated by manufacturers. – Manufacturers’ test results are always conducted under highly-controlled test conditions whereas we clearly don’t have access to soundproof chambers or supremely accurate wind speed measurements. – Allowing for a circa 15% variance, however, we can still roughly see whether the performance figures suggested by be quiet! for these three models are, more or less, if not accurate then at least representative of being accurate.

be quiet! Silent Wings 4 120mm PWM

be quiet! Silent Wings 4 120mm PWM High-Speed

be quiet! Silent Wings Pro 4 120mm PWM

Given that one of the key features of the Silent Wings Pro 4 is the potential to be utilised as replacement fans for liquid cooling radiators, we also decided to give this one a test as well. A key feature of this new ‘Pro’ design is, after all, higher static pressure which, in case you don’t know what this means, is basically that the fans have been designed to sit much tighter to the radiator allowing for significantly less ‘leaked’ airflow (see the picture below for an example).

So, by utilising a 240mm AIO liquid cooler (which shall remain nameless), under standard BIOS-directed operating modes, we can also test to see how much better (or worse) the AIO performs when ‘upgraded’ to these be quiet! Silent Wings Pro 4 fans. – And please note again, we haven’t utilised any of the special settings offered manually on these be quiet! fans. This is a like-for-like, under the same generic conditions, comparison.

So as you can clearly see, these do clearly seem to represent a pretty strong candidate as, if not replacement fans for an existing AIO liquid cooler, then potentially for a custom loop design, you may have in mind. – Put simply though, whatever you use these for, they’re capable of practically anything. You can go for the strong silent type, or you can go full to the floor all guns blazing. Whatever level of performance you’re looking for, these fans can almost certainly provide it!

Fans In Action

No, no ARGB lights to razzle-dazzle you, but we’re still pretty sure that at least some of you are going to be interesting to see these fans in action. – If, for no other reason, than to prove that we got them out of the box at least and didn’t just make the above numbers up!