Corsair QL120 and QL140 RGB fan review - Acoustic performance - Fans Noise Levels

Acoustic performance - Fans Noise Levels

Processors and graphics cards can produce a lot of heat, that heat needs to be transferred away from the hot core as fast as possible, so a good fan will always come in handy. Often, you'll see massive active fan solutions that can indeed get rid of the heat, yet all the fans these days make the PC a noisy son of a gun. Remember that the test we do is extremely subjective. We bought a certified dBA meter and will measure how many dBAs originate from the fan. Why is this subjective, you ask? Well, there is always noise in the background: from the streets, from the HDD, PSU fan, etc., so this is, by a mile or two, an imprecise measurement. You could only achieve objective measurement in a sound test chamber. 

The human hearing system has different sensitivities at different frequencies. This means that the perception of noise is not at all equal at every frequency. Noise with significant measured levels (in dB) at high or low frequencies will not be as annoying as it would be when its energy is concentrated in the middle frequencies. In other words, the measured noise levels in dB will not reflect the actual human perception of the loudness of the noise. That's why we measure the dBA level. A specific circuit is added to the sound level meter to correct its reading in regard to this concept. This reading is the noise level in dBA. The letter A is added to indicate the correction that was made in the measurement. Frequencies below 1 kHz and above 6 kHz are attenuated, whereas frequencies between 1 kHz and 6 kHz are amplified by the A-weighting.  

There are a lot of differences in measurements between websites. We check noise levels of the fan itself in a completely enclosed and closed room. The lowest dBA level we can measure in this room without any equipment activated is roughly 30 dBA. We measure the noise 30 cm from the fan. 

Our acoustics tests are performed with the fans set up in three stages:

1. Low performance - Fixed 5 volts = Low operation
2. Normal performance - Fixed 7 volts = Normal operation
3. High performance - Fixed 12 volts = Extreme operation

The set of results above was captured at ~30cm (similar to the real-world distance between you and your PC). Mind you, we deliberately placed the fan on an NZXT Kraken X62r. We did this because noise is created when the air hits things in its path, so I aimed to make this test as realistic as possible. Noise perception is different in all environments. Our rule of thumb for fans/coolers is simple: you pretty much will not be able to hear anything under 33 DBa in normal conditions.
 If your CPU is overheating, or you are blasting that 16-core processor to the max, your fan RPM might ramp up towards 60, 80 even 100% of the voltage range (depending on the quality and setup of your cooling system). In such a scenario most fans are going to get much louder.