WestCoastMods/Device Unknown
Phobya Fan Giveaway!
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Hey guys!
Here we are with a new roundup. However this is no ordinary roundup. This is a selection of fans offered by Phobya to help you to choose which fan is right for you. If you are saying “any fan is fine” then you have another thing coming. Fans are an essential component in our PC’s, and overlooking them can cause drastic failure to the rest of your system, even a fire.
We use fans in many ways besides their intended uses. We like aesthetics, performance, and value when picking what we need. The most common size is 120mm so we have acquired a bunch of fans from Phobya to demonstrate a few models and show you the fantastic performance of these fans.
Phobya focuses on the primary elements of Fan production. Quality, affordability, and aesthetics.
The models we will be working with today are as follows:
Phobya Nano-G 12 Silent Waterproof 1500rpm Multioption
Phobya G-Silent 12 1500rpm Red led
Phobya Nano-G 12 PWM 1500rpm Red led
Phobya Nano-2G 12 PWM 1500rpm Red led
Phobya G-Silent 12 1500rpm Blue led
Phobya designs their fan blades to be easily removed from the motors by simply pulling them apart. This is a fantastic feature. It’s wonderful for us Modders also who like to paint the blades, not just clean them. Sure beats having to dig out that little retention clip found in most of them. They managed this without sacrificing the quality which you would assume; making it so it easily pulls apart would cause other issues. It does not.
| Fan | Op voltage | Airflow(CFM) | DBA (noise) | MTBF (hrs) | Current Draw | Price *(USD) |
| Nano-G 12 PWM | 7-12 | 64.3 | 10-25dB/A | 100,000 | .45A | $13.30 |
| Nano-2G 12 PWM | 7-12V | 64.3 | 10-25dB/A | 100,000 | .45A | $16.17 |
| Nano-G 12 WP/Silent | 5-12V | 64.3 | 25dB/A | 100,000 | 0.22A | $10.86 |
| G-Silent 12 | 5-12V | 58 | 25.5dB/A | 50,000 | 0.2A | $8.63 |
- All prices from www.aquatuning.us 1/5/2012
You can see from the chart that Phobya really looked into the different needs of each fan and provides us with the selection we need to fulfill the need of a desired fan type. When researching the prices, the best prices I found were from www.Aquatuning.us . All of our fans today run at up to 1500 RPM. I chose these because 1500 RPM is the sweet spot. Any higher and you can audibly notice a difference for a diminished return on cooling efficiency. Also notice that some are PWM and some are not. Some people such as me prefer to use all the PWM fans I can. I like to crank them up during gaming, which usually negates the decibel level of a fan anyway due to my sound system, but under normal office use some noise fans puts me to sleep, so I like to avoid any noise like that like the plague.
In testing these fans, I removed the CPU fan from the Hyper 212 cooler one at a time, testing the full load and idol temperatures for both the stock fan and Phobya fans.
Test system:
Intel i7 2600-k O.C. 4.2 GHZ
Asus P8P67 DELUXE motherboard
Kingston HyperX 1866 Ram (x4) 4 Gig modules equaling 16 Gigs of ram
2x Kingston HyperX 120G SSD’s in Raid 0
Seagate 2TB 7200RPM Drive
AMD 6950 (flashed to 6970) Video
Samsung Blu-ray
Hyper 212 CPU Cooler
I won’t go into detail on driver versions or model numbers; this is to simply give you an idea of what is running and the amount of heat it puts out.
Device Unknown does not like to compare one company’s products to another, so for the sake of this article we will refer the other fans simply as OEM. With a little research I am sure you can find the original fan manufacturers for the Hyper 212 CPU Cooler.
Standard temperatures in our test case with the above hardware netted us 42 degrees (c) at idle. Under full load we climbed to 69. Which isn’t bad. The Hyper 212 is touted as one of the best CPU coolers out there but very dependent on the fan attached to it. So these results are great.
The graph below shows the new CPU Core temperatures with each new fan installed to replace the OEM fan. All temperature tests were run 3 times and the average was recorded.
| Model | Temp Idle (c) | Temp Load(c) |
| OEM Fan | 42 | 69 |
| Nano-G 12 PWM | 39 | 63 |
| Nano-2G 12 PWM | 38 | 63 |
| Nano-G 12 WP/Silent | 41 | 66 |
| G-Silent 12 | 45 | 71 |
From our results, by simply replacing the rather basic fan that came with our cooler, we were able to substantially lower temperatures on most models. Only the G-Silent 12 performed worse, barely.
But what about noise? Although PWM fans have a higher rate of “clicking” noise, we did not experience this with these fans.
Using our decibel meter we recorded the fan noise at idle vs. max. Speeds (Subtracting ambient noise levels). For simplicity we took the reading 3 feet away as that is typical placement of a PC.
Typical dB levels:
80 – City traffic
60 – Normal conversation, at 1m distance
40 – Mosquito
20 – Whisper, at 1m distance
10 – Normal breathing
0 – Threshold of hearing
60 – Normal conversation, at 1m distance
40 – Mosquito
20 – Whisper, at 1m distance
10 – Normal breathing
0 – Threshold of hearing
| Fan | Low dB | High dB |
| OEM | 38 | 49 |
| Nano-G 12 PWM | 33 | 51 |
| Nano-2G 12 PWM | 34 | 46 |
| Nano-G 12 WP/Silent | 30 | 44 |
| G-Silent 12 | 34 | 51 |
These numbers are not necessarily perfect, however they are real close. So just take them for a baseline if you are focusing on sound for your next fan choice.
The Phobya Nano-G 12 Silent Waterproof 1500rpm Multioption comes with black sleeving (standard) but what makes this one different is the “multioption”.
Included in this package are 2 additional cables, also sleeved black, that are labeled 7V and the other labeled 5V which allows you to plug them into any fan header and control the speeds of the fan based off its voltages you supply. Very nice indeed.
The Phobya Nano-G 12 PWM in interesting. It includes a switch attached to the housing that allows you to turn the LED’s on or off.
Love it! However the presence of this little button dangling off the fan may be an issue for Modders. But hey we’re Modders, we can just MOVE IT.
Love it! However the presence of this little button dangling off the fan may be an issue for Modders. But hey we’re Modders, we can just MOVE IT.
The G-Silent 12 fans come with clear plastic housings with LEDs and lightly colored fan blades.
The others are all black housings with colored fan blades. Except for two.
The Nano-2G PWM with the red led is multi colored. Every other fan blade is red, others black. What this does is causes the red fins to light up with the LEDs to give it a unique look.
Phobya has definitely lit up the market with these unique fans. Offering never before seen performance vs price ratio. I am very satisfied with them, but be careful when you are choosing one of these. They have diversified them albeit in a good way, to the point that you have to keep up with their naming conventions. These fans are very affordable and perform as well or better than fans that are twice their price. Keep in mind our scores below are based on the entire series of fans, not one specifically. They all performed exceptionally well.
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