Silverstone AP121 Air Penetrator 120mm Air Cooling Fan Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
860 words · ~4 min read
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Today I'll be unboxing a unique new product. This is the Silverstone Air
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Penetrator. And I said that with a straight face. It
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is a breakthrough computer fan with air channeling technology. It has low power
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consumption. But what fan doesn't? It has industryleading air channeling. Oh,
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I didn't know it is an industryleading air channeling fan. It has wide fan
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blades for reducing air resistance. It is a standard 120 mm frame for maximum
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compatibility with CPU coolers. It has an integrated air channeling grill,
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double as fan guard to reduce overall size. The fluid dynamic bearing is for
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high reliability. So, there's a little bit of an inconsistency to the um way
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that these bullet points are laid out, but I'm not going to hold it against them too much. It is a transparent blue
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UV fan with a black blade. And we're just going to open it up and talk about
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it more once it is open. And I will have
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to cut the sticker because I didn't realize that the fan is actually sealed.
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So, I have a knife. Knives are good
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except when they cut you and not the box. That very rarely happens with me
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though, so I don't worry about it too much. Okay, so inside for accessories,
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we have rubber mounts to go with the air
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penetration. Then we have uh four fan screws.
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So, those are metal mounts. Then we have a Molex to Ooh, this is a good feature.
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I love these. So this is a four pin Molex to either 12vt, 7V or 5vt power.
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So you can use that to as as a fan control. Well, not use it as a fan
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controller. This is a fan controller. So instead of if you plug it into your um
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instead of plugging it into your motherboard header where some motherboards will also allow you to
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control the fan speed from, you can just plug it into here. So okay, I want it to
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run full speed. So just plug it in like that and then plug it directly into the
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power supply. We'll have a closer look at the fan in just no, we'll have a
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closer look at the fan now. So, here are the wide UV blue blades and you can see
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that they are quite wide compared to most fans. Okay, you
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know what? Let's get down to the feature that actually matters. This what this
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does is it makes it so that the air comes out like this. And you know what?
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Silverstone actually has a pretty cool demo of this on their site. So, I'm just
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going to go ahead and sort of navigate there while you uh take in the coolness
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of this fan that the cameraman is pointing the camera at. And uh here, you
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should show them this diagram, too, cuz that's the most interesting part. So,
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while it may seem counterintuitive that I'm going to show you in my YouTube
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video, someone else's YouTube video, uh I'll do that in a moment. So, why don't
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we plug it in and have a look at what the noise is like. So, that means that
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I'll actually stop talking for a minute, which might be nice for the cameraman.
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So, we're plugging it in at 12 volts here, so the camera can sort of
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Yeah. You know what? It's going to be impossible to hear anything. It's really
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quiet, actually. I'm impressed.
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It's very quiet. Okay.
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It's hard to tell if I'm really noticing the directed air flow, but the whole
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idea behind this fan is that it's great for use as an intake fan because the air
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comes out in like a wind sort of tunnled channeled effect. So, it all comes out
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sort of here. Whereas with a normal fan, it just kind of blows all over the
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place. And so, that's what these uh that's what these this grill is for. So,
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um, why don't we plug it in at 7 volts just to sort of, you know,
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make a point here that it's also quiet at 7 volts.
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Wow. I'm a bit of a silence freak, but uh, I'm actually really impressed by
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this. It's not producing very much noise
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at all at 7 volts, and it's moving a fairly decent amount of air. That's
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pretty good. Okay, that video is finally loaded, so we can stop killing time. Um,
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so here they're showing the I think this is the other fan. This is
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some random fan. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Okay. So that's how air flow normally works
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from a fan. And then they show the air penetrator here. So see how it blows it
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straight out instead of all over the place. There you go. That was the whole
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point. Thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Silverstone AP 121 air
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penetrator 120 mm computer case cooling
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fan.