ARCTIC P12 Slim PWM PST Fans - 120mm

The heat is already here and in the south it has started to hit hard. After the traditional cleaning of the PC every six months as part of the measures to control the temperature, I have decided to replace the last two original fans of the case that date from 2012 and that were already starting to make an annoying noise at low revolutions even after cleaning and greasing them.

What is the lifetime of a fan?

As always, the answer depends. A fan will last longer or shorter depending on whether it is permanently rotating or not and on the conditions in which it works. Inside a mine it will suffer more and degrade much sooner than in a dust-free environment.

Although there is no concrete formula for measuring estimated life, MTBF is commonly used, a statistical measure of mean time between failures that not all fan manufacturers state in their specifications and is more commonly found in disk drives and other devices.

The substitutes

The replacement has been the ARCTIC P12 Slim 120 mm, an inexpensive, but balanced and efficient option. They can be bought in a pack of three for about 26 euros. I'll skip their technical specifications. You can find their full specifications on the brand's website.

I leave here a few pictures of these fans that are called Slim precisely because of how thin they are, 1.5 centimetres thick.

Once mounted at the rear and top of the case, they will be responsible for extracting heat according to this airflow configuration.

I wasn't expecting much, but they deliver surprisingly well for what they cost. Up to 1500 RPM, they are barely audible. Above this speed, they don't sound annoying either.

Here you can see them working together with the CPU fan/heatsink, also from ARCTIC.

The bosses are ANTEC Tricool ones that included a three speed switch: L-M and H (low, medium and high) that the brand no longer manufactures and are not easy to find from other brands with those same switches (if they exist) as it is understood that ANTEC custom made them to fit their boxes, in this case the ANTEC P183 V3.

The absence of these switches to manually set the speed is compensated by curves with the old reliable SpeedFan to control the revolutions according to different temperatures.

On the left, the new ARCTIC is 1.5 cm thick compared to the 2.54 cm thickness of the old ARCTIC.

The ultimate test

In this snapshot you have the definitive proof that the temperature is fine and that the noise is not excessive and much less annoying. The comfort expert confirms it.

And that's how the machine stays.