There are numerous options out there for cooling your case. The last I checked everyone and their mother had a fan that was meant to “optimize” the effective cooling by having different blade shapes, or floating magnetic movement opposed to ball bearing movement. And then there are sizes… LOTS of sizes. Everyone’s fan is better than anyone else’s, and the world of cooling has been revolutionized by simply changing the shape of a plastic blade and punching a few holes here and there. Kind of makes you wonder what, if anything, is changed about such minor alterations.
The thing is, that as minor as these changes are to those who don’t design fans for a living, simply changing the shape of the blades could easily add much more airflow, reducing the need for the blades to spin faster, thus creating a quieter PC for us all. That’s what Enermax did. They got their brilliant monstrous brains together and came up with a fan that could keep our cases cold while providing much less noise in the mix. They called it the Twister, which I thought was a silly name for a fan. But you know, who cares if their naming skills suck? They designed one hell of a cool fan. Here are some details on it:
- Revolutionary “TWISTER” Bearing Technology with double lifetime than 2 ball-bearings
- Batwing Blade Design and Carved Halo Frame for extra 20% ~ 30% airflow.
- PWM fan speed control to keep your system silent and cool all the time
- Patented “FAIRY” Frame structure with aluminum for enhanced stability
- Carved “HALO” Frame for minimum noise
- Detachable blades for easy cleaning
- “ECLIPSE” LED for switching on/off the light
- Sleeved cables against wire cluttered
| Specification | Value |
| Model | UCCL12 |
| Speed (RPM) | 500 to 1200 |
| Features | PWM, LED on/off switch |
| Voltage | 12V Current 0.5 |
| Flow (Max) | (CFM 23.83 tp 53.02 |
| Pressure (Max) | (mm-H2O) 0.483 to 1.073 |
| Noise db(A) | 8 to 14 |
| Frame Color | white (modular), clear (modular), black (modular) |
| Black Color | white, clear, red |
| Dimensions | 120x120x25mm |
On the next page we install these bad boys…
I have to admit, that Batwing design is pretty gnarly. They almost give it an aggressive look. Then there’s the aluminum ring that makes up the frame. Enermax has cut their name out of it, giving it that customized feel. However, I don’t see how this is going to do much more than disrupt airflow rather than improve it. Air moving across a smooth surface moves with less turbulance than when it moves across an uneven surface. It’s standard scientific fact. But we shall see what happens.
Okay, so let’s start by examining the product and its packaging. It comes in a tradition blister pack, but rather than having to slice and dice your way into this one you can simply pull it apart after removing the stickers that hold it together. Take a lesson here, you other blister-packers: Your packaging sucks, offers almost no protection, and is a pain in the ass to open. Enermax did it right in this area for sure. Okay, you have the fan out. Underneath that is the information card which doubles as the container for the instruction booklet. At the bottom of the packaging is a little zip baggy which contains a 3-pin fan to 4-pin Molex adapter, four fan screws, and four isolator mounts for those who would rather have them over screws.
Installation is little more than your basic screwing and plugging job. Even if you use the isolator mounts, you’re still in for an easy job in the long run. Actually, it’s quicker than if you had to tighten down all those screws. Then I plugged the fan into my fan controller so I could check out the dB levels at different speeds. The whole process took me all of eight minutes, including using the screws.
On the next page we test the fans…
Once I had that all done, I booted up my PC to see what we had. Immediately, I noticed that I couldn’t hear the fan at all over the sound of my other PC fans. So I unscrewed it and moved it away from the computer to get better readings with my sound level meter. I used a NZXT Fan Controller (reviewed here) to control the fan’s RPMs. Noise values were measured using a handy-dandy noise level meter, and here are the values I got at different speeds offered by the controller.
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At least they keep their promises about keeping things quiet. But what about the airflow? Rather than stick my hand behind the fan, I am going to check internal temperatures of the case while running both standard inflow fan and then replacing it with this one to see if there is any definitive change in temperature over the span of half an hour.
Using the standard case fan for inflow, I got a temperature of 24.8 degrees Celsius after one half hour test run. This was running Vista only, with no programs running and no CPU load. I then loaded up Gears of War for PC to get a pretty good pull on my internal components and played for half an hour more to see if there was a drastic change in internal temperature. The final score after thirty minutes under full load was 31.4 degrees Celsius. So I shut my computer down and left the side of the case off to cool down quickly. I replaced the inflow fan with the Enermax Cluster and put the side back on, then booted up for an idle temperature. After another half an hour at idle, I was getting an internal temperature of 21.2 degrees Celsius. Two degrees may not seem like much, but the toll that temperature can have on an internal PC component is drastic, and a two-degree drop is pretty sweet. So I did another round of full load for another thirty minutes. At the end I was getting an internal temp of 28.9 degrees Celsius.
To be honest, I really could not believe that a single fan could do such a phenomenal job of cooling a case as jam-packed with crap as mine is. Even in my muggy garage. I have to give props to the Enermax ladies and gents for coming up with such an awesome design for the fans, they obviously provide a much quieter ride with more airflow than any I’ve tried so far. So hats off to you, my friends. I can’t wait to review the next ones. But since you’ve already done the Batwing thing, could you maybe try out the platypus foot for your next design. That would be pretty sweet. You could call it the Twister-Pus. Also, the Batwing thing has been thought of before. Remember that movie, Waiting…?
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2 Comment
If ya think this one was good, review the T.B. Silence UCTB12 at 12VDC 900 RPM- 71CFM at 11dB, which is what I use to replace my Thermaltake Armor MX VH8000BWS case fans with and added a third one to the top cover where the toolbox was.
The airflow dB ratio is on par with the best silent fans available. What makes this design spectacular is the airflow pattern. The typical fan moves air in a cone shape outward from the edges of the fans frame caused by the Coanda Effect as air moves through the venturi. The Bat-Wing blade design moves air through the center of the fan, making it particularly useful for heatsinks.