Gadgetory

200 millimeter fans felt like a paradigm shift in the industry back when they were big with the Coolermaster 1/2 X the NZXT phantom 820 the Rosewell Thor and throne cases and silver stones 180 millimeter variance in the Raven zero to that trend mostly died and has recently been somewhat revitalized by the coolermaster H 500 P which contains the master fan MF 200 our units Noctua also shipped their new 200 millimeter fans called the NF a 20s and so it feels as if there's somewhat of a resurrection of what was attempted a few years ago today we're testing the Noctua NF a 20s versus the Coolermaster MF 200 our fans including some brief tests in the H 500 P before that this video is brought to you by thermal grizzly makers of the conductor not liquid metal that we recently used to drop 20 degrees off of our coffee like temperatures thermal grizzly also makes traditional thermal compounds we use on top of the IHS like cryo not and hydronaut pastes learn more at the link below for anyone who is into PC building a couple years ago you probably remember the two hundred millimeter fans being basically everything at least all the big cases had them a lot of NZXT stuff cooler master cases fantex cases had some the inner max cases had some so they were making their rounds but before we get into the review you really have to look at a couple of things which is why did they come about what were the positives and why did they go away so that we can understand why for a couple years at least almost no case has had 200 millimeter fans and they've suddenly come back with the H 500 P which is somewhat building on a legacy of the half series and then now knocked well with their own 200 millimeter fans so there's a resurgence here so let's talk about that part of the reasons they went away were cost being one of the big ones they're expensive to make and they're expensive to buy as a consumer part of the reason they're expensive is because obviously the size but more than that in order to keep the fan operating within spec and make sure it doesn't have weighting issues or off balance issues you have to spend money on them quality had to spend more money on the hub the motor and the bearings because if that motor and those bearings are carrying these bigger blades that's more weight that causes strain on the fan on the bearing and on the motor so this is something we spoke with some of the engineers about why they moved away from those fans and that was more or less one of the bigger issues so you could get them cheaper but you have the issue of potentially blades snapping we had some of that happen on the old NZXT fans before they had a gen to come out or of just the motor dying out or wobbling as it spins for example another reason that they went away was the the form factor of the fans so even on these fans they have two mounting holes two sets of mounting positions for the fans Coolermaster has two sets as well and there are a couple other form factors out there for large fans there's a kind of weird one that Silverstone largely exists in which is 180 with their air penetrator fans from the Raven case and there's a couple there's at least one other 200 ish sized fan that has its own set of mounting holes so this meant that there was not a lot of standardization between the cases which meant that because the manufacturers didn't really agree on how they should be mounted and where the mounting holes should be positioned you had issues of incompatibility and now when we're in an age where customizing is at the forefront look at things like RGB LEDs for example and all the tempered-glass incompatibility doesn't necessarily fly so that was a big problem too and then another one is just cases moving away from a cooling focus and moving away from big mesh panels and trying to get back to closed off paneling sleek is kind of a big buzzword to throw around to things like that so then it's just moved away the pros of these fans they're larger so they can move a lot more air because they're cut through a bigger hole obviously in the case and this means that you can run them at lower rpms they're quieter has a lot quieter in some cases but they move a lot of air and that air is also over a wide spread of just over the whole case so if you have a side panel that's got a 200 it that's very nearly the size of your motherboard it's great for cooling the GPU it's gonna get some cooling on the VRMs as well if you have an a IO or a CLC and will help out pretty much everything in the case so that's a big positive so that's most of the upshot in the original deployments these were against metal mesh paneling so we're gonna be using some of that today in our testing to go over what we're looking at the Noctua NF 820 this one cost $30 right now the master fan isn't yet available separately but probably will be at some point it's what's in the H 500 P now and based on other master fan RGB prices stand-alone we would assume that would also be 30 to 40 dollars so they should be pretty direct comparison the master fan also is crazy on the RGB this fan has no LEDs at all it's just I mean putting LEDs on this would be kind of pointless anyway look at it so they're very different and how they look which means they kind of focus on different markets you don't buy this because you want it to look good you buy it because you want it to look like naktu I guess and there's something to be said for that as well because there are plenty of people who like to have that nock to a look because I guess to some extent knocked was done very well to market themselves as a sort of an engineering focused brand and they've now associated this color with that so if you like that look then obviously you're not going to get that with Coolermaster as for how we tested we have a we actually have a wind tunnel now we're not using it for these fans because they're too big for it but we will be using it soon so keep an eye out for a big fan roundup that we're doing with wind tunnel testing but what we're doing instead is similar to what we did for the Noctua china-made versus taiwan made fans we have an anemometer that allows us to take measurements in linear feet per minute and we're positioning that on the outside of a case side panel so we're using a thrown side panel with mesh on the side it has native 200 millimeter fan support it supports the mounting holes for all the fans that we have presently and we're only testing two today so we mount the fans of that push the air through the panel and then take a reading of that airspeed on the other side and that gives us our LPM or if you prefer fpm reading which is linear feet per minute we are also testing for noise we're testing LP m at every rpm range in steps of 10 percent so 30 to 100 or 40 to 100 we lose resolution after that and we're testing the noise up many of the same intervals but we have a noise floor of 26 DBA so below that you get no reading basically you read the room noise at that point and then finally we have a noise normalized chart for the LP M as well so let's get through it we're gonna start with the linear feet per minute flow will look at normalized noise the noise after that starting with the LP m chart now we're looking at a range of 40 percent to 100 percent for which we'll have matching rpm numbers in the article link in the description below the Noctua fan pushed air at 423 linear feet per minute at 100 percent RPM a lead over the cooler master fan a 378 L p.m. keep in mind that these gains don't necessarily translate directly and especially not linearly to performance uplift in a real system air flow is complex so it's not a linear scale to convert LP m gains to temperature gains for example at the low end of the RPM range from 40 to 60 percent Coolermaster retain the lead but those speeds are low enough that you're really not moving much air anyway and not doing a whole lot of cooling at 40 percent we're at 145 to 160 LP m with the breeze weak enough that there won't be much appreciated component performance with either of these two fans the two tie at 70 percent matching at 275 LP m and to really get an idea of how this compares we can do it noise normalized test next these noises represent various RPMs we can show those in a moment at roughly 34.5 DB a plus or minus 0.5 the NOx with an pushes for 24 L p.m. where a cooler master does at 334 LP m at 33 DBA we're running at 386 L p.m. on Noctua and 3:02 on cooler master 31 DBA has us at 316 versus 275 L p.m. for Noctua and cooler master respectively as for where those noise that were chosen hears the noise chart overall and the rough 34.5 DBA range comes as a middle point between the 100% RPM knocked to a fan and ninety percent RPM Coolermaster fan which run at roughly thirty four point nine and thirty four point four DBA respectively our testing scale is down to about twenty six point nine DBA and this is where we no longer have test resolution the noise floor of the room is about twenty six decibels and we disable all system fans so it is not possible for us to test below this noise floor and we also lose accuracy as we approach twenty six the knock to a fan remains generally ahead but has a wider acoustic performance lead at the low-end if you recall Coolermaster had a bit of an L p.m. lead at the same low end for its test so these would match with those noise findings and just quickly here's an RPM chart that shows the RPM to PWM response or rpm two percent response in terms of the one hundred percent versus forty percent scaling on each fan if you want to see how fast those go then ask for temperatures blender GPU testing often had our difference within margin of error and test resolution with a maximum change of about one degree Celsius the blenders CPU test shows about the same testing three marked fire strike we saw the Noctua fans were generally about one to two degrees advantaged for GPU temperatures so not that exciting so for the H 500 P that we tested and controlled testing with a lot of different tests between them we're not seeing a huge difference certainly not one that if you wanted extra performance you should go by the fans for and I should mention as stated a moment ago this was for the H 500 Pima schmod so we actually made it easier for the case to breathe and it still got to be some static pressure performance for the fans some optimisation for static pressure because it's fighting that front mesh but basically we're not seeing a huge change with this particular setup it's possible that with different setups you would see more of an uplift with Knoxville vs. Coolermaster the bigger difference is looking at the noise to rpm or the noise to LPM change because at 100% we're seeing kind of roughly the same performance favoring Noctua one to two degrees max but not to a can run at the can maintain the same LPM flow as the Coolermaster unit with a slightly lower fan speed and also a lower noise level so really what this comes down to is less raw performance at max RPMs and more of performance and consistency of performance as you decrease the RPM to better accommodate noise neat they're pretty quiet already at 100% but if you wanted them quieter you can step down knock to a further while retaining more performance theoretically depending on the case of course and and then you would be able to get a better noise normalized result than with coolermaster for example they're not gonna be that far apart though in performance it really is it comes down to knocked was a little bit quieter cooler master has RGB LEDs and comes with the aged 500 P so those are two things to consider as for the cooler master fans in general we notice that our fans wobble a bit and a lot of you noticed this in the review as well we never mentioned it in that H 500 P review but the particularly the one fan we were testing which was 50% of our sample size from coolermaster wobbles kind of like a bike wheel that's out of true so you'll see it just sort of I don't know it just it moves around about the axis as if it's off weighted or just not fully centered or something like that and that's what actually creates some of the noise difference because that wobbling which exists on both samples does create some noise and that's largely where the difference comes in actually but yeah that's that's really it pretty simple test in terms of performance you probably don't really need to pick based on performance it's just what do you like the looks of and the master fan you can't technically buy right now anyway a time of filming so that's not really an option unless you're just looking to buy the case and then trying to figure out if you should replace the fans stay tuned though we'll have a full fan roundup 120 and 140 millimeters here's what I'd like to you to do if you have a particular fan that you really want to see tested in 120 or 140 sizes leave a comment below and we're gonna go through them and pick a few probably between 5 and 10 of the most popular suggestions and then test them on the new wind tunnel that we're working on setting up subscribe for that you can help us out directly on patreon.com slash gamers nexus where you can also join our discord and talk with me and the rest of the team or you can go to store it at guaranty Nexus dotnet to pick up a shirt like this one thank you for watching I'll see you all next time