ThermalTake A2450 120MM Cyclo Pattern Fan?

[Pob255]

I'm thinking of getting one of these to put into the front of my casecom case, just wondering if anyone has used one or seen any reviews for it?

This is what it looks like in operation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zv6Rynczmkc

I think it looks great just wondering what it's like as a fan?

[nibbler]

that's stupid but very cool

[Pob255]

So has no one has used one of these?

[Pob255]

Well I went a head and got one, it arrived today.

To answer my own question, it looks great but as a fan it's not so good.

The fan it's self is very solidly constructed, not cheap & soft plastic, there's no flex in the frame at all.

A very tiny amount of vibration when it's running at full speed.
The fan blades them selves are not very agressively shaped.

The fan hub sticks out above the frame and the funky led patterns are achieved by a pcb arm sticking out of the hub above the blades, this has 4 led's on it.
So the patterns are made by turning these led's on and off at precisely controlled times.
the down side is this spinning arm must have an effect on the noise, the edges of the pcb arm are rough (like most cut pcb's) which doesn't help ether.

The packageing reads, 1500rpm 64CMF 17dBA, haveing had this running . . . I think thermaltake are takeing sound measurements from 10m away in a padded room, that's the only way I can think of that they could get just 17dBA out of it.
In terms of air flow, it's half way between an Antec tri-cool's high and medium settings, so pretty good.

Annoyingly it's 4pin molex only and again the package helpfully says operation voltage 12v, started voltage 9v, so I was a bit worried that a volt mod would be limited to 9v.
However I tried it at 5v, it started fine, sounds much better, but the led's are now very dim
Tried it at 7v (the old 12v vs 5v mod) not slient but not too loud and the led's are brighter.
Side note: the patterns still worked fine at both 5v and 7v speeds, the rate of pattern change seemed to slow down very slightly aswell.

So to round up, as a fan it's not great, at 12v it's noisey, reduce the voltage and the fan is better but the led's suffer.
The Led rotor arm and the perspex fan guard (needed with that spinning rotor arm) do make this fan a total of 41mm wide and limits it to being attached at the rear of the fan only.

I've got more on this and some pic's but I'm running a mini-led fan round up atm, still working on it so I'll say more then.

[OilSheikh]

I was gonna get this at £10 ish to be the silent fan for my PSU. Now I wont

[Nikomus]

The patterns are cool, but I'm not sure I like it jumping around all the time.. Can you set it to stay on just one?

[Pob255]

The patterns are cool, but I'm not sure I like it jumping around all the time.. Can you set it to stay on just one?

nope, it's pattern constantly changes and rapidly too, I wouldnt mind the constant change if it held each pattern for say 10 seconds.

I'm thinking of trying to take it apart atm, probably ask my dad to take a look at it as I'm no electronics wiz and he'd figure out how to mod it, if it can be done.

[Pob255]

A little update on this.

I gave it to my father to look at, him being a (now retired) electronics engineer.
I explained about it being too noisey but the loss of voltage to slow it down to sane sound levels made the led's too dull.

Well he managed to take it apart and do something about it.

For thoes intrested, he though it would use pick up brushes or simular to get power to the circuit board with the led's on it, so he could just add in a resistor to bring the voltage that feeds the LEDs down.
However that's not how it worked, what he told me was that it uses a generator in the top just under the pcb, so as the fan spins it also generates current to feed the LED's.
This means any attempt to slow down the fan will also reduce the current generated that feeds the LED's
Luckly the current generated is fed through a 100ohm resitor before it goes to the LED's, so he carefully remove that resisitor and replaced it with a 30ohm resistor
or that might of been the other way around, which is why I asked him to look at it and didn't try myself
The upshot is now I can run it at reduced voltage and the LED's stay nice and bright (he did warn me not to try running it at 12v as that would probably blow the LED's)

I've tested it out with a 7v molex mod and it looks and sounds good.

And while I did ask him about the speed and frequency of the pattern changeing, there's nothing that can be done about that as it's controlled by a ROM chip, the only way to do that would be to get the original code, edit it and flash that onto an EPROM and swap the chip out.
Which is just not really practical.