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Best fans for watercooling? EKWB VARDAR Series Fans

2015-03-02
hey what's going on guys Jays $0.02 here and we're going to start getting into some warm months here pretty soon so I figured this year we'll get things started a little bit early when it comes to the cooling videos especially right now during the warm months for many people this is when you can get the most overclocking done so my friends over at ek have launched a brand new fan called the bard our bard our vard Vardar they're from Slovenia I have no idea what that means honestly if you guys know please tell me but anyway these fans are pretty much going to set a new standard when it comes to static pressure and water cooling then again that that's not really all that surprising given its you know ek which is a water cooling company with its improved radiator support and legendary noise optimization the new define are five from fractal design is a PC builders dream come true click the link in the description to learn more all right now when it comes to fan reviews I'm not a big fan do you see what I did there of specs on the box because often times companies will put their best specs in a wide open atmosphere with zero ambient noise when it comes to measuring things like sound and static pressure and air flow I mean really when it comes to real-world how many times have we seen fans advertise that they're super quiet 18 decibels but the moment you turn them on it's like the loudest turbine engine you've ever heard so we're going to go ahead and we're going to talk about the specs we're going to put see what they put on the box and then we are going to go ahead and test this one ourselves now there's a whole range of what our fans they have this is the FT - 120 it's a 1450 rpm 120 millimeter fan it's a high static pressure fan specifically designed for static pressure and I've got F 1 F 2 F 3 F 4 and F F 5 now they did send me 14 50 and eighteen hundred and fifty rpm variants today we're looking at the 1450 I think this is going to be more or less the sweet spot that people are going to be spending when it comes to RPMs on different water cooling and case fans and whatnot now these are 1450 RPM plus or minus 10% rated voltage 12-volt DC and power draw of 0.7 3 watts that's the first step that I think is really kind of a telltale of where these fans are really going to fit in in your systems and we'll talk about that now this version here is the PWM they do have a 3 pin and a 4 pin PWM this is a PWM but of course pulse width modulation fans can work on 3 pin DC direct output or DC output like I'm have hugged up here to the motherboard so we are going to be testing today and DC that way I can ramp them up and down when we do our test air flows advertised at 88.4 m3h instead of pressure of 14 psi what that is honestly this must be a metric thing because normally fans are rated in mmh to O of static pressure so I really don't know what 14 PA is if you guys are like physicists out there watching me one why the heck are you watching me and to tell me what that means whatever loudness 25.6 DBA that seems believable doesn't seem outrageous operating pressure okay fine life expectancy 50,000 rpm or 50,000 hours 50,000 rpm this thing is an airplane now the physical aspects of this if you guys are familiar with fans remember the old gentle typhoons these actually look a lot like that but there's actually a side by side photos of these on sites like overclock net that show these are quite a bit different but we do have one two three four five six seven blades and we do have a vented hub on here which is nice it's going to keep the different phases here in the motor cool one of the things that happens with fan motors over time is they get hot and they wear out but this as you can see is vented so as the air is coming through the fan and pushing out and pulling in it's going to also be offering a little bit of cooling now the downside to that is if you do want to paint the blades themselves because as you can see here the black and gray is was my biggest complaint about the Typhoon's they were black and gray and then the naktu is which are pretty famous or brown and poop tan color they do allow for an all-black version I don't know why they didn't send me that but anyway we're taking a look at the gray one here if you want to paint this you've got to remove the blades from the hub which you know sometimes is a little bit scary it's not easy to remove these fan blades I started to tear the label back to see how easy the label would come off the label starts to tear so the moment you take off the desk cover yeah you're probably going to end up need to put a new sticker on there of some sort so but when it comes to voltage draw that does say right on here DC 12 volt 0.06 1 amps that is extremely low current which means that this you could daisy chain these things for days on fan controllers that are capable of 30 watts like most motherboards like my eyes rock here is capable of at least 24 watts and 1 amp you could daisy chain well a lot of these I can't do math really quickly off the top of my head but point 0 6 1 amps means you could put quite a few of these together before you get that one amp you know max draw on many of the headers so let's go ahead and do some airflow test it's been a while since I've done any sort of you know experiment here on this channel let's go ahead and do that now I've got a couple of really ghetto extensions here plugged into a chassis header on my asrock motherboard my ex 99 fatality extreme motherboard over there and as you can see right now I've got it hooked up to speed fan and speed fans been configured for this motherboard so I can now control this header so this is a PWM fan but it is hooked up right now to a DC 3 pin output so that's how we're going to be connect or controlling it now starting voltage on this I've noticed is at 50% and as you can see it started to go for a second there and then it stopped 55 and starting voltage on this seems to be a little bit inconsistent see I didn't touch anything and now it started if I put this back down to say 50 it'll keep running if I go below 50 the fan will stop because it seems that 6 volts is right around where the starting voltage is on this so if I go back up to 50% you see the fan does continue to run now let's go ahead and see how much air we're actually moving in terms of the paper test at 50% believe it or not guys I do have an air flow meter but I don't really care what the air flow meter is I kind of want to give you guys a visual I mean I could show you a number but that doesn't really equate to how much air that is that's moving or pressure so we're going to put this in the corner of the fan because we know that that is where the most airflow is coming out the corners of the fans and let's go ahead and see if I turn this like that and you guys get a pretty good representation of what it looks like so it's going to go starting voltage of 50 percent what I will tell you right now is this thing is extremely quiet right now with my ear against it I can't even I can't even hear it I've had 50% so theoretically this should be right around 700 rpm so it's going bumpin up to 60% and see how the paper reacts you see we're starting to get up off the table a little bit there 65% still can't hear my mics right here in fact if you guys are hearing anything it's probably the 3 gelid fans that are inside my radiator right there because they're not being controlled yeah I know it's kind of a contaminated environment for this test but this isn't so much about noise for me as it is for static pressure but I will say right now there this is an extremely quiet fan they sent me a box of these of a feeling they're going to be going in some systems so at 65% there's just a faint hum with my ear against the damn thing I'm actually taking a risk of cutting my ear off I guess things I do for this channel alright 70% now we can hear a little bit of a hum see if the mic picks it up 75% incoming now I can hear the fan a little bit I hear ok the moment I picked it up off the table all the sound went away so what we're getting here is a little bit of vibration from the motor translate translated into the table and so we're hearing that if I see if that might can pick it up and probably not but the moment it touches the table so if you were going to mount these things you definitely are going to want to use some sort of maybe rubber stand off or something anti vibration mount then it wouldn't be an issue at all so anyway that is 75 percent eighty percent eighty five ninety now I can really hear it but again the moment I pick it up the noise is gone there's no more vibration 95 and 100 what I've noticed is that there's really no rpm difference between 95 and 100 according to speedfan this thing is running right now fourteen hundred and twenty seven rpm so pretty much right in the advertised range 1468 so we're definitely getting our 1450 that you paid for and as you can see right here based on the piece of paper we do have a pretty good amount of static pressure coming off the front of the fan now that may not look all that impressive but what if I did this what if I took this piece of paper and put it all the way out here as you can see the paper is laying flat but the moment I go in front of the fan let's say even way out here what does that tell you what does that tell you now about the static pressure of this fan see straight up and down or that you can tell right when it gets into the wind tunnel of the fan right there that see it doesn't matter which way I hold it that's actually pretty impressive and the closer we get to the fan you can see it's it maintains that amount of pressure way out in front of it so that's pretty impressive but what I also have here is a 120 millimeter radiator because you can't test static pressure without putting some sort of resistance on the fan so let's go ahead and mount this thing up in the radiator here which happens to be an alpha cool radiator and let's go ahead and see how it does when you put some resistance in front of it alright so here's our little setup here with the single 120 rad and one of the Vitara fans on there the fourteen hundred and fifty rpm let's go ahead and put our little piece of paper back on there on the middle of the rad I want to see how the middle of the radiator fares on this and let's do once again our startup voltage of about six volts alright the fan is turning so you can see that Ben is turning and you can see we're not getting too much happening on the paper but I do feel air coming through with my hand there go up to 60 70 80 90 and 100 these fans are extremely quiet those gelid fans over there and that triple are way louder than these in fact I can guarantee you we're three of these fans are going these are right now at a hundred percent I'm going to actually put this thing next to my mic I don't think eyes can hear that this thing is freakishly quiet and yet look how much static pressure we're maintaining through the radiator now let's go and take our piece of paper over here and do the same thing in front of it look at this that is pushing through a radiator now if you were to do push-pull on this thing that would be even crazier those gallons right there and stupidly loud so I can promise you now I mean they sent me a bunch of these because I said hey guys you know they ask people when to do this review I said yeah send them over if I like them I'll ask for more so they basically sent me a box of them said if you don't like any better send them back well guys you're not getting them back these this fan right here holy crap alright this fan at a hundred percent right here in front of me I can't even hear it over those over there and if you look at the static pressure here considering it's pushing through a radiator I think you guys would have to agree that this is a pretty impressive fan for what it is so all right well there you go guys that is the new road our fan here from ek this specifically the FT - 120 1450 I imagine the 1850 would probably be a bit louder and a lot more pressure in fact you know what for the sake of the video being a bit longer I'm going to grab one I'll be right back to cue the transition transition all right like I said I had no intentions of actually busting out the 1850 rpm version of this fan because I personally would have never used in 1850 rpm fan specifically because of the noise so based on how quiet the 1450 is I've got to see how 400 more rpm performs and the noise level on the motor because this motor is stupidly quiet but it looks like there's a lot of phases in the motor it's well cooled it's well oiled doesn't say what kind of bearing it is on here I wish it said what type of bearing it is but it doesn't actually say I'm sure you guys could find out on the website so there's the 1450 we're going to actually do the swap normally I would have just cut and then it would have been on but I want to go ahead and just do this one on camera so here's an 1850 let's go ahead and do the standalone tests before we put it on the rad see what the starting voltage and all that is now if the motor isn't super buzzy what tends to happen with fans that are higher rpm that you slow them down as you slow down the fan you get a much more buzzy motor because the motor is operating on a much lower voltage than optimal so right now this is running at 1,000 rpm at 60% let's put it back to 50 let's take our paper stick it on the corner alright so there's our paper right there at 776 rpm this is a thousand rpm 972 here's 70 percent 1200 rpm 80% 1500 rpm 90% is 1792 RPM 100% seventeen hundred and seventy-six rpm it's like we're not quite getting the 1850 but we are within the now we're at 1800 there seems to be a bit more vibration in this though at this rpm but as you can see by the paper it's considerably louder let's listen there's a bit of a motor hum and but as you can tell by the paper though I mean look at this I mean if that doesn't look how much more that that paper is a move this back look how much more that papers pushing out of the way there so let's go ahead and stick this thing on the radiator and see how it does all right so we're mounting up on the rad once again 1,850 rpms let's put our paper on there I've pretty much already know what to expect with this it's going to be the same level of performance let's go to starting voltage 50 rpm or 50% let's drop the plug can certainly feel the air moving through now moving the paper too much though 60 we're still at a thousand rpm here 70% that's 1300 rpm 80 9100 so yeah as you can see it definitely delivers when it comes to the static pressure there's there's no denying that at all way that I'm just barely holding on to that paper and let it kind of fly around in the wind there so noise wise though yeah play a cooling device well duh well there we go guys whoa whoa all right there you go the new Vdara fans here from ek I don't believe these are a rebrand honestly I think this is their own their own fan if you guys are doing water cooled systems they do come in black also you should definitely check these out because in terms of static pressure noise and performance as long as a lifespan holds up and the weight of these fans is also insane there they're actually way heavier than like my Corsair fans I think I might have a new favorite fan and that has nothing to do with the fact that they've sent me a lot of water cooling stuff in the past I'm hard on fans I'm very picky about fans and the performance of these things definitely live up to the standard especially the J standard alright guys going to get on out of here make sure you guys follow on Twitter Facebook Instagram all that fun stuff and you guys will always know what's coming on the channel thanks for your continued views and support it means a lot to me and my family and just keeps this being fun this wasn't fun I wouldn't be here doing this for you every chance I could get so I'm gonna get out of here I suggest you guys do that to go play some games or do something fun send me some pictures of what you guys are doing with your computers and stuff and as always guys thanks for watching
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