Three ARCTIC F12 or two ARCTIC F14 fans?

[Endre555]

Hi,

I'm building a budget PC for one of my friends and I can't decide if I should buy three ARCTIC F12 Rev. 2 120mm PWM fans or two ARCTIC F14 Rev. 2 140mm PWM fans for the air INTAKE of the case. The case will be a Cooler Master MasterBox Lite 5. I think that the three smaller ones can probably push more air than the two slightly bigger ones, but I'm not so sure and if the system was quieter that would be also better. The system won't be producing that much heat with these components I chose:

ASRock AB350M Pro4
AMD Ryzen 5 1400
Kingston HyperX FURY 8GB (2x4GB) DDR4 2400MHz
GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1050 OC 2GB
7200RPM SATA HDD
possibly an SSD sometimes in the future

So, what would you recommend? 3 x F12's or 2 x F14's?

 

[Unolocogringo]

Air flow for 3 120s=161cfm
air flow for 2 140s=148cfm
very close air flow measurements.
Both are rated at the same noise output so 2 140s would be quieter.

 

[Endre555]

Air flow for 3 120s=161cfm
air flow for 2 140s=148cfm
very close air flow measurements.
Both are rated at the same noise output so 2 140s would be quieter.

And do you think the 2 x F14's + the 120mm CM exhaust fan which comes with the case the would be enough to cool this system properly?

 

[geofelt]

Air flow for 3 120s=161cfm
air flow for 2 140s=148cfm
very close air flow measurements.
Both are rated at the same noise output so 2 140s would be quieter.

And do you think the 2 x F14's + the 120mm CM exhaust fan which comes with the case the would be enough to cool this system properly?

I would vote for that solution.
140mm fans are quieter.
That setup is sufficient to cool a hot graphics card and an overclocked cpu with an air cooler.

Your ryzen 1400 is not a particularly hot cpu and the GTX1050 is a very cool running GPU.
You could replace it with a GTX1080ti and not have an issue.