Cougar Vortex HDB 120 Cooling

Pros:- great looking fans- well made, solid frams and impellars- effective vibration reduction system- nice sleeved cable- moves air very nicely in and out of my 250D; good pressure (tissue test)- very quiet; I run mine at 100% in the 250D, H80i front intake and 2 set to side exhaust; minimal noise, all from movement of air, not fan motor noiseCons:- I honestly can't think of any, the cost is on target, the performance is above par, the audible volume is totally within reason at 100%

As many others have said, these things are near silent and push respectable amounts of air. Cable has a solid sleeving, plus well-designed rubber pads in the mounting points, a feature I find works better than any similar product attempt. I prefer them instead of many other "Quiet" and "Silent" fans, a description that very few can fulfill. Coupled with a good fan controller (or motherboard monitoring if you get the PWM Version), the only sounds are a slight whoosh of air. Best of all, NO motor noise unless I set my head against the fan whilst it runs, and even then it's minimal (inaudible from >1ft away). Had other noisy fans and thus replaced them with Vortexes. Even for the slightly elevated price point, these are a quiet system builder's dream come true. Worth every single penny, and then some.On a side note, the airflow on these things isn't as good as an airflow-optimized fan, like Corsair's AF 120 Performance for example. However, every single fan I've used that had higher or equal CFM also was an order of magnitude louder or more, mainly from motor noise. These have the best CFM/dB balance out of everything I've tried.

Decent fan, air channeling isnt very impressive though.This fan was initially meant to be an intake, but has almost no static pressure to pull air through a filter and actually channel it towards the center of the case.Fan is now on GPU exhaust duty.Pros: Quiet, PWMCons: Low CFM, Low static pressure, slight vibration.Just an fyi, I have the same version of the fan in the 140mm flavor and its twice as bad as the 120 in terms of pressure and vibration. I wouldnt even bother with the 140s, especially for the price.Ive tried quite a few fans, and I always go back to Delta AFB1212L, M, or H versions because you cant beat their performance for the price, and they even outperform fans that cost 3 times as much (noiseblocker, noctua etc). If you look, you can usually get them for under $10 on auction sites

I needed to replace the 3 fans inside my desktop PC with an emphasis on price / performance / noise. My case has a built in fan speed controller and I wanted to pickup fans with 3 pin connectors to make use of it. I've been eyeballing these Cougar fans for years and decided to give them a try. I'm thrilled so far with these fans. I'm running them all at 7V and they are practically silent but still moving enough air to keep my PC running cool. When you kick the fans up to 12V they do become audible but it's a soft hum and not annoying at all. The only time I can see doing this is during gaming when I'll be wearing headphones anyway so it won't be an issue at all. I'm now contemplating getting a PWM version of this fan to put onto my Cryorig H7 CPU cooler. If you too are looking for a balance of price / noise / performance then definitely give these fans a try.