Noctua NF-F12 PWM 120mm Fan Review

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.

Updated Performance Testing on Page 7