News EK-Furious Meltemi Fan Can Break Your Fingers at 3,500 RPM

Pat Flynn

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I wonder what the low end range of RPM is on this fan. It might be super loud at max RPM, but could be a lot better at 50% and still provide good static pressure at a reasonable volume level. It'd be really interesting to see a benchmark between this fan and Noctua's newer A series fans.
 

TechLurker

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I want to see actual comparisons to similarly available Delta fans in the 3000-3600 RPM range, as well as comparisons to the old guard used by hardcore (besides the Deltas and rebranded Deltas); the San Aces and Nidecs. Maybe any spare GT AP-29s and AP-30s and Noctuas too.

About the only immediate advantage to this new 38mm thick fan is consumer-level PWM. Some newer Deltas or rebranded Deltas feature consumer-ready PWM, whereas San Aces and Nidecs (and Sunon, etc) use a different PWM frequency that either requires controlling via a custom PWM controller, or just voltage controlling them.
 

PaulAlcorn

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I want to see actual comparisons to similarly available Delta fans in the 3000-3600 RPM range, as well as comparisons to the old guard used by hardcore (besides the Deltas and rebranded Deltas); the San Aces and Nidecs. Maybe any spare GT AP-29s and AP-30s and Noctuas too.

About the only immediate advantage to this new 38mm thick fan is consumer-level PWM. Some newer Deltas or rebranded Deltas feature consumer-ready PWM, whereas San Aces and Nidecs (and Sunon, etc) use a different PWM frequency that either requires controlling via a custom PWM controller, or just voltage controlling them.

I had some San Ace's back in the day, jesus they were amazing. Two paired in push/pull on a copper TRUE. The pinnacle of air cooling, and noise, for those days. Probably even still today.

Had a few AP-30's, too, though i used AP-15's for my rads. They still run smooth as butter to this day.
 
Still running a pair of high cfm San Ace 120's with a high end CPU air cooler, and they don't seem to need be run much past about 40% to get the most out of them. Still amusing to hear the rev up of the jet engines. :)

Sure as heck wouldn't intentionally stick my finger into one of them, even sans the red wiring.

It would be interesting to see graphs of various fans compared, to see just how well they work from say 20% (or min starting voltage) - 100%, comparing temperature deltas with noise levels, seeing at which speed each fan hits that point of diminished returns.
 
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These are really not terribly impressive, considering the obvious comparison would be to Noctua's NF-F12 iPPC 3000rpm industrial fans which have a 7.63mm H20 static pressure compared to the ~7.13mm of these fans, and a 109CFM airflow compared to 121 CFM, BUT, with only a 43.5db decibel level compared to the eardrum shattering 60.9db for these jet engine turbines.

Personally, if you want to really move a lot of air I'd just slap some of the Noctua NF-A14 iPPC 3000rpm fans on a heatsink or radiator, because with over 10mm static pressure and 158 CFM, if brute force is going to be the key, it's pretty hard to beat the performance of those fans and they still only belt out 41.3db max. And at only 25 bucks for the 140mm version, they are also cheaper.

I think EK still has some work to do in the lab.