Comparative review: 67 casefans

67 products related to this article

Introduction

We often come across new casefans in the Bling! section of Hardware.Info Magazine. When we cover them there, we focus mainly on the appearance of the machines. Here we look purely at functionality. We asked a large number of manufacturers to send in casefans with a minimum size of 8x8 cm. All fans were judged in terms of air displacement and volume level. Extra features the fans might have had like LEDs or CCFL lighting did not play a part in the final judgement, even if a sizeable part of the fans we tested did come equipped with lighting. This will certainly add to the looks of a casemod!

Fans, purpose and necessity.

With the increase of performance of computers comes the fact that the average pc has been using more and more power. The well-known law of the conservation of energy tells us that energy can never be disposed of, and that almost all absorbed energy is converted to heat. Not just the power supple and the processor are major sources of heat, but also the videocard, the chipset on the motherboard and the hard drive also use great amounts of power these days.

Traditionally, only one fan is present in a pc: the one in the power supply. Since the earliest IBM pcs a fan was built into the PSU to suck out hot air and thereby guaranteeing stable operations. But with the introduction of Intel's 486 DX2 processors and AMD's 486 DX4, it became necessary to actively cool the processor itself with a separate fan. Not long after, it was the videocard's turn. When Nvidia introduced its Riva TNT2 chip, many manufacturers already mounted an active cooler on their cards, but it became a real necessity for the GeForce chips that followed. At that time, the first fans started appearing on the northbridge of motherboard chipsets, amongst others the popular Intel 440BX chipset for the Pentium II processors were actively cooled.