i don't have the best impression of snails and not too long ago a whole bunch of them were
eating all the vegetables in my garden and you know i got it was an open season on every snail
and slug in the garden until i discovered copper tape which reacts with their slime
and it gives them a nasty sting and no more snails why are we talking about snails oh yeah
so they're definitely not the brightest or the fastest creatures but i was very curious
then why this was called the wonder snail so is this one a tale of slow and steady wins the race
or is this a nasty sting the backside that's what we're going to find out today
welcome to machines more so this is a fan that a lot of you have been asking about
and uh today we're going to check it out so big thanks to scythe for letting me review these
i did receive these fans free of charge to make this video but i am this video isn't
sponsored i'm not paid for this and the review and testing methodology is 100 my own so many
of you are familiar with the kaze flex which this is a good general purpose fan but those
these two tend to top out at lower rpms depending on the model like these go up to like 1500
but with kind of the same frame design and color scheme is the scythe wonder snail 120 millimeters
and unlike all the snails that i am familiar with this is a pretty fast bugger, it's spec'd at 2400
rpm plus or minus 10 this one did test in at 2300 rpm but i'd say that's certainly within the
plus or minus 10 percent spec fluid dynamic bearing the blades are the axle doesn't have
play in it but the blades are a little bit flexy just like the kaze flex not high-end quality but
not exactly cheap junk either so kind of just in the middle nine blades and it does spin clockwise
as opposed to counterclockwise for a lot of fans and i do think i understand where
it gets its name from because it's got this curvature kind of like the whirl
of a snail but without the slime so you have a moderate budget and you're looking for a good
performance fan you might be interested in this one since it comes in at only 17
usd to test it out i stuck it on the open air test system that's running a 10850k with a 360
rad let's see how it does many of you have seen the phanteks t30 review and while these are in a
different price tier it's still a good reference point and we'll be comparing these against the
higher end fans today as a reference point but i will just include this one into the 120 millimeter
rad fans part two that's coming out so that let's jump into some noise normalized testing at a lower
noise level the wonder snail spins at 1100 rpm versus the noctua nf-a12x25 at 1200 and t30
at 1250 and i'm actually surprised how close it came to the noctua the coolant temp ends up about
a degree and a half behind and the cpu package temple is a similar gap that's not too bad when
you consider that the notch was almost twice as expensive i did get a bit of an odd noise pattern
at this noise level but i'll get into that next when it comes to acoustics at the next level of
plus 1.6 decibels from the noise floor we're still about the same about a 2 degree gap in the coolant
about the same for the cpu temps and this is about 67 percent pwm for the wonder snails
last in our noise normalized comparisons is the plus 5.4 decibel noise level and yes between 1450
and 1775 rpm there's a big jump in the noise level for this fan but even with the rpm deficit against
the other two the wonder snail isn't terribly far behind i mean it's a significant gap but
it's still within one and a half to two degrees overall of the noctua so noise normalized rpms
are a little bit slower but i wouldn't quite call this one a snail's pace but that is responsible
in part for the thermal gap there i mean if you look at the results between the three levels
basically the wonder snails performance for the from the two higher noise levels as close to the
noctua's performance at the sound level before it speaking of sound these fans aren't bad but
i did detect some hum especially at 1100 rpm i'll be moving the mic a little bit closer
to highlight it at 1100 rpm then i'll take you through the other noise levels
the noise characteristics aren't the most polished but then again i'm testing on an open-air rad
system if you have it inside the case you might not hear it that well we're talking about a fan
that meets a moderate budget after all but overall it is a decent fan if you can stay out of the
rpms that have the odd noise and while the build quality does lag behind that of the higher priced
competitors i say it's pretty close to that from the arctic p12s and actually they
look a lot like the p12 slims right but these also have that same feedback at around the
same rpms like 1100 rpm you got that p12 growl kind of the same here a little food for that
for the price of three of these you can only get 1.7 t-30s so what happens when we price
normalize well let's cut the t-30 a little slack and we'll round up to two so what happens when
we compare three snails against two t30s at full speed well the t-30s go up to 3000 rpm
and at that level two of these are five decibels louder compared to the three
scythe fans at 2300 rpm it's close but it's still pretty interesting the t-30 still comes
out slightly ahead of course i doubt anyone will really want to run fans at this noise level i mean
this is 12 to 17 decibels over the noise floor so realistically speaking at reasonable noise levels
three of these wonder snails will match or slightly exceed the performance from two
t30s so if you're space constrained and you can only fit a 240 it's actually pretty interesting
how far you can go with two t30s but a lot of your budget constrained and you have space so
in that case it makes a lot of sense to go with more fans at a lower speed on a bigger rad and
i'm pretty impressed how close these come to the higher price competitors and this were a snail
it's the fastest now in town so we'll see how it stacks up against some similar priced fans in
a video coming up later this year stay tuned for that and the n200p max review should be coming up
next let me know if you have any questions about that case because i will be going through some
of the comments and answering those questions in the initial review so make sure you're subscribed
that bell for notifications give a like links down below for these thanks for watching today