Hello, this is the Provoked Prawn, and this is a video on Noctua's fans specifically on the
NF-A12x25 these are 120 mm premium fans from Noctua that are designed to offer excellent
cooling performance with PWM control and superior performance over and above a lot of the other
fans in the industry they're renowned for being particularly good and in this video I'm going to
show you why and how to install them the things that are included in the box and talk to you
about the various highlights of them now when I unboxed these fans I was immediately struck
by the overall quality of them they're nice solid heavyweight fans with a really good design on them
there are a number of interesting highlights now these aren't cheap they're quite expensive
but the reason for that becomes quite apparent when you get them out of the box and then start
to install them and use them you can see these aren't RGB and they're not black they're very
striking in their color makeup but beyond that they're also interesting for a number of reasons
they're very solidly built with a really solid setup that includes steel and brass internals
as well as a liquid crystal polymer compound as well in there so some
serious business you'll also notice that it has anti-vibration rubber mounts around the outside
and a very premium sticker on the rear also has an interesting design with a stepped housing
that encourages the air through from the front and reduces things like vibrations and other
noise inside the box you also get a low noise adapter that sets the fans to run at 1700 rpm
instead of 2 000 maximum so as she chills things out immediately wants to make it quieter you also
get an extension cable which gives you a bit more length in the cables as well as a y-splitter cable
which allows you to essentially plug two cables into one fan header on your motherboard I'm going
to show you the process for doing this a bit later on because it can get a bit messy and if you have
a multitude of fans that I do here for example then you need to work out where you're going to
plug them in on your fan headers because you might find you have limited number on your motherboard
so some thought needs to go into how you're going to do that and I'll explain what that means later
on how to do it but it is nice that all these things are included the other thing you'll find in
the box is this rubber outer housing the logic for this is that you can replace the standard rubber
bungs around the outside and then you can use this on a radiator so for example for an AIO cooler
you can use these fans on there and get improved performance you'll also find these bits of rubber
can be used to attach the fans to your case that obviously helps to reduce the overall noise levels
and minimize vibration noise and things like that so instead of using screws you can use these and
there's instructions on the box and how to do that you also find traditional screws if you prefer
to make sure things are nice and tight to the case as well so what you're already seeing is a really
interesting design with a number of highlights to it and it's really hard to put across in video
just sort of a premium feel of the fan really good build quality and a nice solid design
also obviously is multi-functional since it'll work with radiators as well so it offers good
static pressure and excellent cooling performance no matter what you're doing whether whether it's
intake exhaust or being used on a fan so another close-up look at these cables simple little cables
tiny little noise adapter basically allows you to reduce the maximum speed without having to mess
around in the BIOS or within software settings the y cable definitely makes life a lot easier
allowing you to plug in two fans into one port and then you have the extension cable the extension
cable I found is also pretty important if you want to make things tidy in your case because what I
found is that especially when you have that wire cable plugged in you end up with quite a lot of
chunky looking cables at the front of your case and it can end up looking a bit messy so I ran
this extension cable through to the rear of the case and then back through to the front and this
allows to make things a little bit neater it's worth bearing in mind also the required voltage
for these fans and what your header on your motherboard is giving off so I wouldn't recommend
necessarily stacking loads of them together I've seen that people in other videos suggesting that
you could put multiple different fans into this by stacking y cables on top of each other and then
for example having four cables running into one and then putting that in the header that certainly
wouldn't be a good idea you will find that each motherboard offers a different power for each
of the fan headers on your motherboard and that potentially could cause problems too is probably
a safe bet anymore might be a bit risky what you can see here is a comparison with the 140 mm fan
from Noctua which I was using as part of the air cooler and stored from the CPU and you'll see
again a similar sort of overall design to it and an excellent quality and a close-up
look at you'll see the little highlights like the fins on the fan itself everything marked to push
towards that airflow in a close-up look you'll see that for example there's these rings on the
inner edge of the fan and that all is designed to help pull that cold air in and make it run well
now a quick look at how I installed them in my case so this is the Lian Li Mini Snow Edition
and I've installing a multitude of fans in here in a variety of positions exhausting air out the top
and intaking from the bottom and that rear panel and the installation here I was using the screws
to hold it into place and setting it up and as I said the cables I'll show you in a second
will be running into the back of them back through to the front now combined with the motherboard
that I'm using the good thing about this is you can adjust the fan speed control and you can also
set these fans into a zero rpm mode so as well as going up to 2000 rpm maximum and obviously
delivering really fast cooling but in a less obnoxious way than some other fans because these
give a good sound when you're using them although quite loud depending on how many you've got they
also will run quite and I'll show you that in a second now with this motherboard there are several
different fan header ports on here and it's worth bearing in mind which ones you're using you'll see
two for example underneath the CPU itself and then there's another two underneath the SATA power
connections there so you have reasonable access to some there and there's another one at the bottom
there's also obviously for the CPU itself there's two at the top we have a standard CPU fan header
and there's an additional optional one here but you can see there's a limited number of system fan
headers and chassis fan headers essentially on the motherboard so you really need to plan out if you
bear in mind for example that as eight fans then you can see I only have five headers so if you're
using the trying to connect them individually with each one you're going to come unstuck so the y
splitter cables become essential to make things a lot easier I basically use the y splitters on
every single cable and then an extension lead so running those y splitters to the back because you
can see once you've put two cables into one you then have a lot of connectors and extra cables
and it starts to look messy so if you have space to run them to the back you can then tidy things
up and make it a bit neater and then run them back through to the front with the extension lead
I'll leave all the specifications of these fans in the description because there's lots of highlights
and features that are worth knowing but hopefully this has been some interesting insight into how to
set them up and how I did it I found the cooling performance is excellent and the fact that you
can run them in 0 rpm mode means that you can basically make them really quiet when they're
not needed when the fans are when your case is at a good temperature and it's all really cool
enough and you don't need to make it extremely extremely cool or to bring the temperature down to
so a look at the finished product and you can see some of the cabling here you'll note for example
that one of the cables from the rear for that exhaust fan is sort of messy and I could perhaps
install this in another way but it's just plugged into underneath the CPU header I figure once the
GPU's in you probably won't notice that quite as much and the overall finish is quite good now in
the BIOS settings and in software you may find things like fan control for example you'll see
in the ROG armory crate there's a fan speed setting here and ai cooling if I select silent
in that middle setting that then puts the fans into the minimum spinning you can also adjust
the fan control within the motherboard settings and tweak when the fans will spin and what levels
they'll spin at and that's a different video entirely but this sort of software makes life
a lot easier this has been the Provoked Prawn hope you found this video useful thanks for watching.
This has been the Provoked Prawn, hope you found this video useful, interesting, hilarious,
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