OC3D Fan Showdown – BeQuiet Pro vs Noctua PPC vs Coolermaster Mobius

Cooler Master’s Mobius 120 and Mobius 120P ARGB

Cooler Master has just launched their new Mobius series of fans, and today we will be looking at their Mobius 120 and Mobius 120P ARGB fans. Thankfully, we were able to convince Cooler Master to give us three of each to allow them to participate in this fan showdown. 

The Mobius 120 series features a new fan blade design from the company, using a “Ring Blade” design to add more rigidity to the edge of their fan blade to eliminate vibrations and deliver lower overall noise levels. As you can see below, Cooler Master’s Mobius 120 fans offer users a black/blue colour scheme, which may make these fans difficult to integrate into your systems. To be honest, I don’t understand why Cooler Master didn’t go all black with these fans, then again, this colour scheme does differentiate Cooler Master from other brands.

Cooler Master’s Mobius 120 fans can run at speeds of up to 2050 RPM, making these fans the slowest fans that we will be testing today. That said, we will be running all other fans at 2,000 RPM to compare their noise levels and thermals at this speed. 

Cooler Master’s Mobius 120P ARGB fans feature an all-black surround and clear blades that are illuminated by RGB LED lighting. These LEDs are individually addressable, allowing users to create some interesting lighting setups with these fans. Cooler Master’s ARGB technology is designed to be compatible with a broad range of motherboards, making these fans easy to integrate into almost any system. Cooler Master’s RGB lighting technology is not proprietary, allowing users to utilise the ARGB control software and hardware that they prefer.

These Mobius 120P ARGB fans can run at speeds of up to 2,400 RPM, which is 20% faster than Cooler Master’s Mobius 120 fans. With its higher speeds and ARGB compatibility, Cooler Master’s Mobius 120P ARGB fans cost £5 more per fan than Cooler Master’s standard Mobius 120 fans.  

Be Quiet! Silent Wings Pro 4

Be Quiet is a company that treasures silence above everything else. That’s why their company is called Be Quiet! That said, the company has had to acknowledge that some consumers want fans with a little more umph, which is why their new Silent Wings Pro 4 fans can run at up to 3,000 RPM in its high speed mode. Those who want quieter fans can use switches on these fans to cap its maximum RPM, giving users a quieter system. 

The Silent Wings Pro 4 ties with Noctua’s NF-F12 iPPC fans as the fastest fans that we are testing today. While most users will not utilise these speeds on a day-to-day basis, they are available for whenever they want to push their overclocks to their limits, or want to push their benchmark scores as high as possible. 

Noctua’s NF-F12 iPPC Heavy Duty Fans

Noctua’s NF-F12 iPPC fans are by far the oldest that we have tested today. These fans have been serving is faithfully for years, being our go-to fans for applications where we need as much cooling performance as possible.

With their 3,000 RPM speeds, these fans are not designed to be quiet. That said, not all users run these fans at their maximum RPMs. Due to their black colour scheme, these fans have remained popular over the years for simply being a black Noctua fan, though other black Noctua fans have been released since these fans launched. 

While Noctua has a newer black fan design on the market with their NF-A12x25, it caps out at 2,000 RPM, and we did not have any of them on hand for testing. On top of that, we wanted to see how these fans compared with Be Quiet’s Silent Wings Pro 4 fans at 3,000 RPM. 

 

Rated Pressure 

We created the graph below to have a look at the rated pressure of these fans, as we intend to test them by using them on an all-in-one liquid cooler to cool a high-end processor. 

As you can see, the Noctua has the highest listed static pressure rating and Cooler Master’s new Mobius fans have the lowest rating. That said, Cooler Master’s low rating is mostly due to their lower fan RPMs. That said, Be Quiet’s fans also run at 3,000 RPM and also offer much lower pressure rating. 

We will see in our testing is this metric matters that much when it comes to real-world performance.