be quiet! Silent Wings 3 fans now available

[HEXUS]

Range of fans is said to offer "No Compromise Silence and Performance".

Read more.

[virtuo]

One of my aerocool dead silence 120mms started rattling the other day, looking forward to trying these out - see how they stack up

[Kilmatead]

One thing I could never figure out about the Silent Wings 2 series, why would a fan rated by the manufacturer at up to 300,000 hours only have a 3 year warranty? 300,000 hours equates to 34 years.

Maybe it's just the Germanic sense of humour...

That said, my Dark Rock cooler is as quiet as you get so I'm not complaining, but if this thing is still spinning when I'm 82, I may grudgingly admit that German engineering just might be better than I thought...

[Biscuit]

One thing I could never figure out about the Silent Wings 2 series, why would a fan rated by the manufacturer at up to 300,000 hours only have a 3 year warranty? 300,000 hours equates to 34 years.

I presume the "rating" is to do with the expected life of the motor component, however the warrenty covers the device and accessories as a whole.

[Kilmatead]

I presume the "rating" is to do with the expected life of the motor component, however the warrenty covers the device and accessories as a whole.

Exactly! The only component anyone would take seriously in a fan (as far as warranty is concerned) is the motor itself, while the miscellaneous petroleum-based bits are essentially irrelevant unless they are damaged during production.

The only way a fan blade is going to break is if I do it myself, and for that you can't (or at least shouldn't) claim any warranty status, as that would be silly.

Thus, you're left with a three-year warranty on a (supposed) 34-year motor. Once upon a time in America there was a company called Craftsman Tools who offered lifetime guarantees on their manual tools (wrenches, screwdrivers, shovels, etc) - since 1927, if these broke for any reason during the lifetime of the tool, they were replaced on the spot just by walking into the shop without a receipt. Naturally, as the years went by, the corporate-types decided this was a silly idea and so since 2012 have reduced it "officially" to 25 years with receipt, which still sounds generous, but any time you start limiting your previously unlimited things, you've already lost the plot.

In other words, it's reasonable to expect the plasticy bits of the fan to last a quarter of a million years, but if I left a fan running for decades, I'd expect the motor to be the first thing to cause trouble.

All that being said, the Tuniq Tower Cooler I bought 10 years ago (all the rage when C2Q's came out) had a fan that ran 24/7 for all those 10 years and was still spinning quietly when I retired it a few months ago. As far as I could tell from Tuniq they only ever made claims about the db-level of the fan at speed (assuming they even produced it), not its lifetime.

Don't get me wrong - I don't take any of this seriously (anyone remember the ill-thought-out "Amanda" pseudo-Peltier cooler?)... most company claims related to cooling are just marketing nonsense; at the end of the day whether it's a chubby chain-smoking Oompa-loompa employed to blow air over the processor or the magically sweet breath of a thousand vestal virgins directed on a 6700K, if it works, it works.

I'm just saying that the Germans seem to have an odd conception of warranties and mechanics, is all.

[quantasm]

This site http://www.silentpcreview.com/article1346-page6.html has best fan comparison I've managed to find. Interesting that they say airflow is not a major factor so it simplifies to which fan has the lowest temperature rise vs noise. To me it looks like most fans in the list are very close in performance and there is only a small rise of a few degrees by running the fans much slower and quieter.