Noctua NF-A12x25 PWM, Premium Quiet Fan, 4-Pin (120mm, Brown)

I ordered 8 fans for my PC to switch out my old fans in my 2019 self-built, budget PC. All fans were replaced. The exhaust and intake, and for my new CPU air cooler (not noctua), the stock fans were replaced with these. After much research, the NF-F12 (pressure oriented) and NF-S12A (heavily airflow oriented/very low pressure), looked to be quite a sacrifice in performance over minimal price difference. AKA, the price:performance ratio wasn't worth it for me when it wasn't far from an A12x25 PWM.Spending $260 for some fans was painful, I'll admit. But when the mean time to failure rate for these fans is 150,000 hours or 17.1232877 *YEARS*, and their warranty is 6 years, my investment was made(felt) easier!First off: NoiseRight before these fans, I had the redux fans installed (NF-P12 redux-1700 PWM) as my 3 - 120mm intake ones for about 2 weeks, before returning them for these A12x25 fans. And man, they were LOUD. Most of the games I play really heat up my PC (Flight sim, Star Citizen, Apex Legends), therefore my fans are often spinning on the upper side of their RPM range.These A12x25 fans at high speeds can be loud, but they have a nice white noise with acoustics that sound like they were thoughtfully engineered. Honestly, anything above 1500 RPM is noticeable. Going into this brand of fans, I had expectations wayyy too high and expected them to never make a single sound. This is definitely achievable with limiting their speeds or getting fans with ultra low noise, but that starts to cost your cooling performance.Good news though! When my PC is idling, I actually have the opposite problem where the fans are so quiet that my refrigerator hum is no longer opposed and is singlehandedly driving me crazy with its "weeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr".Performance:Genuinely noticeable. Both with temp sensor reading and especially holding my hand over the exhaust fans. Again, in my previous set up had budget Arctic fans and had an AIO cooler. Now, I have all A12x25 fans and a Thermalright Phantom Spirit 120SE heatsink. My temperatures on my CPU as well as my overall GPU temps have gone down a lot. Like by 10C or more. Even on my CPU when I used the stock cooler fans on the Thermalright vs noctua fans, noticeable difference in temperature and noise there. The performance to noise ratio is phenomenal, with some games like Minecraft, GTA V, and a couple other low power games, performing well without any fan noise!Price:You get what you pay for in life. And with this fan, you DEFINITELY get what you paid for. That price is an excellent representation of its worth. I just hate myself that I justified a $33 price point per fan, but I am so happy.Quality:Fans are heavy and feel like they were built carefully and beautifully. They come with a LARGE selection of addons included in the packaging like rubber "Screws", metal screws, pre-installed anti vibration pads around each corner, even an extra anti vibration sleeve to even further decrease vibration, a y-cable, extension cable, and low noise adapter supplies. All this included in a fancy package, with more packaging information then you could ever want to learn about with the fans.I don't know how I feel about having so many attachments, as I only used 2 y-cable and 2 extension cords. Which leaves me with about 36 unused accessories total. Which I will obviously not throw away, but doubt I will use any more for many many years to come. So I am torn on that large surplus of accessories but at least you get more than you need, rather than needing more than you have. Having 8 fan packages open on your floor will definitely require some space, so be tidy when you open them to prevent having a large organizational mess.Overall:This fan came out on May 2, 2018, and has yet to be superseded by a better Noctua fan nor any other brand. I sincerely doubt that an upgraded version will be substantially better in the near future. Just like with video game graphics, they are already fantastic and it takes a lot to improve it just a little. I feel like it may be the same with aerodynamics and fans. In the end, this investment is worthwhile and will last you for possibly decades with a performance that will be unlikely exponentially bested in the fan's lifetime. Do yourself a favor and start upgrading your PC fans. Start with intake first, then exhaust. Then consider your cooling systems too, but as they have the least amount of fans that make noise, I suggest starting with your case fans first in my personal opinion.The only regret you'll have is that you didn't buy these fans first.

Outstanding item. I used it with the rubber feat to sit on top of my fanless router which has a case shaped like a giant heat sink. The router is 20°C cooler now and the fan in virtually silent.

This is actually too good for me. I bought two of these to put on the rear and bottom of my Raijintek Styx case. The build has a Tuf Gaming B660m-plus WiFi board and a 12700k CPU and no GPU card. I figured a CPU as hot as this is supposed to be would make keeping the case cool difficult even with my crazy Arctic Liquid Freezer II 240 AIO I also bought and left the stock fans on.Right out of the box these fans are hefty. There's some meanness just in holding onto it. Much heavier than I'm used to, no doubt about it. They exhibit a lot of weight just on the blades themselves. Give it a flick and notice how long it takes to stop. It's not quite a fidget spinner but closer than anything else I've tried that calls itself a computer fan.The cable sleeves are a nice touch. corner Bumpers are nifty. Not too hard to pop them off and install the included gasket thing that you can use to block all air from escaping around the sides (between the corners) (recommended for use on high pressure applications like Radiators). The included and pre-installed bumpers cause a gap of about 1mm all along the sides that some air could escape through otherwise. Another solution is just to remove the bumpers from the corners on the side that you will have against what ever it is this is going on. In theory that'll result in more noise but a tight seal is assured.The anti-vibration mounts are little rubber tubes that you can pull through the screw holes. the longer end goes through the fan all 25mm and sticks out the other hole. The shorter end you pull through the screw hole on your case or what ever. The ends of these are tapered, you pull hard on it until the wide part pops through. I wouldn't use that to mount it on a radiator. I didn't use them on the case either, but some might prefer it. I think this is ideal for a temporary install though. You can pop them back out, hopefully not breaking the tube off in the process and easily reuse elsewhere. These do stick out a ways. If you're gonna use it somewhere there's not room for the little rubber tube to stick out you can cut it off once you have it installed, but doing so will make a future installation using the same mounts more difficult as you no longer have anything to pull on.My setup lets the CPU package have 144 watts at all threads max load, 4.7ghz p, 3.6ghz e. The darn AIO which I have on top pushing air out is so mean it's keeping the whole case cool all by itself. Meanwhile, I can stop the fans on the AIO and these Noctuas are mean enough pushing air into the bottom and back of the case to passively cool the AIO's radiator, lol.My CPU idles around 72f, temp sensors on the Motherboard between 72 and 93f while doing light load tasks like web browsing. My case is cold to the touch.I put one of these on the other side of the radiator from the stock fan, set it to half speed then gave the stock fan a flick with my finger, it wasn't being powered. It got enough force from the Noctua all the way through the thick radiator to keep spinning, with the Noctua at half speed!This is one mean fan! I did find that if I put my ear right up against the back of the case with the rear Noctua spinning, I can hear the blades going by like you can hear if you go behind a box fan and hear if you talk through it. It's a rather obvious and loud pop every time one of those many blades go by. But at anything more than say 5 inches you can't hear that part of the sound at all.I have no trouble hearing these in the Styx case if I turn them above 40 percent but they really move an incredible amount of air even at low speeds, so if you need quiet, these can do it, just use the included LNA adapter or set the curve in the bios or using a third party program like Asus AI Suite III or Fan Ctrl. These are probably a good investment even if you will limit the speed because their pressure and airflow is so great.For my purpose, the cheaper Redux1700 option would have been fine. I put those on another build I did a while back and they work well there and are not noisy.

Installation was a breeze, my computer cools just fine and my computer is quieter than it was even before my old case fan needed replacing. Wonderful replacement to my old fan. I can understand the hype

get what you pay for with noctua

My stock Alienware had a rear fan that sounded like a jet turbine, with this fan, the noise was drastically reduced (I can't even hear the rear fan).The install wasn't bad, and the box came with plenty of vibration reducing parts.I'll probably end up getting two more to replace the top fans in the next couple of weeks.