| SilverStone SST-AP181 Air Penetrator Fan |  |
| Reviews - Featured Reviews: Cooling | |
| Written by David Ramsey | |
| Sunday, 08 August 2010 | |
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Page 5 of 7
Fan Testing and ResultsThe system I used for testing is the same one I built into the FT02 case originally, which I described in my SilverStone FT02 Computer Case review. It comprises an ASUS P6T V2 Deluxe motherboard, 12G of Corsair Dominator memory, two NVIDIA GTX480 video cards, and an Intel Core i7 980X processor. I used Everest Ultimate version 5.5 to load the processor with the "Stress CPU" and "Stress FPU" tests. The results are presented as "thermal difference": the difference between the processor temperature and the ambient temperature. For these tests the Intel Core i7 980x processor was overclocked to 4.1GHz with a 160MHz BCLK and 1.35 volts.
The CPU cooler used was a dual-fan Cooler Master V6GT. And here are the results:
SilverStone claims that the AP181 fans set to "low" provide the same performance as the original case fans set to "High". This certainly seems to be true: in fact, the AP181's on low provide slightly better performance than the FT02 fans on high. The difference between the stock fans on low and the AP181 fans on high is 3.7 degrees. Now let's look at the NVIDIA GTX480 temperatures with the video card fans set to "auto". I took idle and load temperature measurements (using Furmark 1.8.2 Multi GPU version to load the cards) with the case fans set to both low and high speeds.
Here we see much less difference between the FT02 fans and the AP181 fans. The AP181 wins by a degree or so at idle with low fan speed, but actually falls behind slightly at idle with high fan speed. When the cards are loaded with Furmark, the temperatures with the AP181 fans are actually higher than the temperatures with the FT02 fans. Let's try the test again with the GTX480 fans set to 100%, as they might be in an overclocking or benchmarking scenario.
Here, the AP181 fans provide a much better performance: the GTX480 load temperatures are 0.9 to 5.9 degrees cooler with the case fans set to "low", and 3.9 to 4.9 degrees lower when the case fans are set to "high". But then I had a crazy thought...
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