That's how you upgrade a computer,
right? With the purchase of a qualifying Intel processor, SSD, or Knuck, you
could instantly win an Intel gaming jersey and be entered in the draw for
the Ultimate System. Click now to learn more. Linus and I like our premium fans
and we're both quite public about being fans of Noctua and with pretty good
reason. Noctua is able to boast extremely high build quality, great
thermal performance, and very low operating decibel levels. Lately,
they've even addressed the issue of their kind of puke brown problem by
introducing their Redux and especially their industrial PPC line of fans, which
I'm a big fan of, but they're pretty crazy expensive if you think about it.
In many cases, people are buying these premium fans to replace fans that are
already installed in their case or that come with a radiator by default. Is it
really worth it, though? Does a price performance value of swapping your fans
really make any sense in this case? Or should we be more focused on investing
in different parts of our computer? We decided to find out. Let's start with
our test setup. We have an NZXT H440 with its defaults fan setup of three 120
mm fans in the front and one 140 mm fan
in the back. Then we have a Corsair H105 with its two default 120 mm fans
strapped to it up in the top of the case which will be cooling an i7 4930K. When
we switch to Noctua fans, we'll be replacing all of the 120 mm fans with
NFF12s and we will replace the 140 mm
fan in the back with an NFA14. First off, we have our thermal testing. Our
4930K is running at stock and as per usual, our idle test will be ran with
minimal processes running in the background. Our load test is ran with
Prime 95 running small FFT mode just to stress out the CPU a little bit and get
that heat flowing. In both thermal and audio test cases, the fans are running
at about 1100 RPM for the stock and the Noctua aftermarket fans. Secondly, we
have the audio test case. This was done by shutting off everything in range that
could make noise. That means straight up unplugging pretty much all electronics
in the area and even going as far as unplugging the fridge that was on the
floor below just because it was slightly too close. I then set up our Xtech
digital sound level meter and recorded it with a camera just to make sure
everything went okay as I wanted to leave the room just in case the sound
meter would pick up my breathing. So essentially, yeah, there was an
improvement. Awesome. But maybe not the $24 worth of improvement that you were
hoping to get. This money could easily be shifted into other parts of your
computer for a more noticeable performance improvement in most cases. A
lot of things in the computer modding world aren't exactly worth it in a price
performance sense. And while I can sit here and bash on performance fans, there
are other culprits as well. Do-it-yourself water cooling isn't exactly the biggest reward for your
investment either, especially if you're a fan of buying premium components. And
this brings me to the conclusion. I've known what the results of this test
would yield for quite a while, and I'm sure many of you watching knew as well.
But that doesn't stop people like Lionus and I from water cooling our computers
and outfitting them with top-of-the-line fans and other stuff like that. But this
doesn't exactly have the greatest price performance ratios, and that's okay with
us. If you're on a tight budget and trying to build a gaming rig that will ultimately live under your desk, you
should probably just focus on your core components in this case. If you're a fan
of performance components and essentially the computer version of a hot rodder, then it's probably fine for
you to torch your wallet a little bit and invest in premium stuff like premium
fans and water cooling. All right, guys. So, what do you think of premium setups?
Are you into that? Are you just buying like extremely gaming optimized ones
that are as low cost as you can get while getting the highest performance
out of it that you can get? Let me know in the comments down below. While you're down there, like, favorite, dislike,
subscribe, share, all that kind of stuff. And if you want to do that in
another place as well, jump over to the forum and do it there. And if you don't
like the ads, become a contributor as normal. If you want a shirt for some
reason, check the link in the description down below and you can get an awesome looking shirt there. I think
we have our better than useless shirts on sale there. I know a guy that
actually works here recently bought one, so that's pretty cool. Thanks for
watching and I'll see you guys next time.