The Strangest Fan Ever Built Returns | Fan Showdown S7E7

[00:00:00]Fan Showdown season 7 episode 7. And now that we're on episode seven, I think it's time to start thinking about what we're going to do in season 8. And if you have any ideas of how you want to test fans or what we should try to cool or whatnot, make sure to leave in the comments down below. I'll be checking it out. See what you guys think. I have a few ideas, but I'm not sold just yet.

[00:00:19]Now, the first fan of the day, we're going to take a trip down memory lane.

[00:00:22]Some of you might have been around when this first appeared on the channel. Some of you might not, but this fan first appeared five years ago. The fan in question is the Bladeless, which was made by Shawn, and Shawn's back, but now he has a bachelor's of science in mechanical engineering and three years of experience in aerospace. And with that acrudeed experience, Shawn is here to try to make the Bladeless better than it ever was before with the Bladeless Mark II. Sean said that after a bunch of CFD testing and real world testing against the A12X25, he sat down with the Bladeless to try to make it better than the original. Then he figured out that what he came up with 5 years ago was just about as good as he could get it to do. So he pivoted to make an exhaust version for this season of the Fan Showdown. Now, Sean did say he has some concerns about the exhaust version of this fan actually being able to fit on our test setup with the IO shield and the the RAM stick and kind of gave me a model that I can modify to fix, but I don't want to do that. I want to keep the original. So, I I'm sure we'll figure something out to make it fit, but that is the plan that we still have.

[00:01:25]Well, we basically remade the original.

[00:01:26]I reprinted the original and now we have the inverse. This one will intake. This one will exhaust simply due to the shape that Shawn created. I do think it's kind of nuts that someone like Shawn is still around. he would. The the Bladeless, the original was on what, season 2, episode 3 of the Fan Showdown. And Sean said he's still around. He still watches it.

[00:01:43]And obviously, he's still submitting designs. So, let's hope this one turns out good. This one's very heavy. I compared it to this one. I mean, they're basically the same geometry with this flare out at the top, and this one is considerably heavier. Next up, we have Jason and his two fans called Nameless.

[00:01:58]It's funny because most people kind of give me their fan. They don't give me a name or description about it, but J Jason just went straight to naming the fan Nameless. probably to pay homage to everybody that doesn't name their fans.

[00:02:08]Jason said he went for designing a fan for each side, a a specific intake fan and a specific exhaust fan. The idea for the intake side was to keep a tighter, narrower air flow and hopefully a nice tight twist, aiming to drive the air into the center of the fin stack. On the other hand, the exhaust side was designed to grab that air from the center of the fin stack and kind of fling it out to the side in a radial fashion with the idea being that these two fans when combined together will reach maximum power. Third up today, we have Colt and his fan Cyloid. Colt said that this is a nine blade design that follows the blade count of the Noctua A12 X25, which kind of inspired this whole thing we've been doing for this longest time. And that was basically it when it came to his uh description of what it what it was. B basically took the nameless approach, but he named his fan. Now, Colt did send multiple versions of his fan. I kind of just picked the one with the ring on it. The idea being that these are blades are pretty thin. They had a very thin contact there with the with the print plate. And they could have possibly warped when they were spinning around.

[00:03:10]So, I think that ring might actually help them out. I don't know. Maybe I picked wrong. But that is what we have.

[00:03:15]These are basically the same fan.

[00:03:16]Printed it twice. One for intake, one for exhaust. We'll see how it does. The fourth fan in the lineup today is the Bezier, which was created by Norman, who describes himself as an old guy with too much time on his hands. And we're all moving. We're all moving in that direction. Norman said that while going through fan showdown withdrawals, cuz I don't really put these out as much as I should given how busy life has gotten with two kids and a job and everything that maybe will get better, but maybe not. But Norman said that he decided to just read a research paper like we all do and design his own fan. This research paper was talking about turbine blade profile designs using the bazir curve.

[00:03:50]Now I'm no bazir curve expert. But what I could gain from the limited amount of research I tried to do is that a bazer a bazir curve is a mathematical way to draw a smooth curve. And we all know that smooth curves are beneficial when it comes to blade profiles because airflow doesn't like bumps or sharp corners. And using a curve that is very smooth will give you efficient less turbulent less noisy air flow and hopefully improve performance.

[00:04:14]Essentially designing a turbine blade profile using a bizier curve creates a smooth profile that can be modified by the engineers using a small number of control points to optimize that blade shape for ideal performance in whatever environment that it's going to be used in. Now within this research paper, Norman specifically used figure 2 for his inspiration in his blade shape and his design kind of went for a multiple blade situation. You can see that there's less blades in the center than there is on the edge and they're separated by like basically a ring in the middle. Now, normally this would be the end of the fans. We normally do four fans per episode of the Fan Showdown, but this episode I have five is now. This one is a bit different, so stick with me here. It is essentially an entire fan versus just a fan disc. And it was, well, I guess you could say submitted by Cooler Master. It's their Master Fan A120. And this is a bit outside of what we normally do on the Fan Showdown. But I have a reason. Now, normally I wouldn't add a consumer fan into the Fan Showdown. That's not what this series is really about. It's more about us just having fun making up designs, printing them out and seeing how well they do. But I did so for this one because it's unique.

[00:05:22]Yeah, this is an all aluminum fan. And many of you out there over the years have asked me to create an all- metal fan many of times, which I've never done because it's just kind of a a pain. I do have a we do have a metal 3D printer at work that I could probably use to create a fan, but it's such a pain to print in the special stainless steel filament matrix and then have it centered together. So, I just never really mess with it. And it's not just an aluminum frame. The blades, they're aluminum, too.

[00:05:52]Now, you might be thinking, why? Because I also thought, why? It seems like a very expensive undertaking for a PC fan.

[00:05:59]But there are benefits to going with all essentially an all metal fan. Now the advantages for going all metal especially on the blades is that they are much stiffer. Obviously aluminum is going to be much stiffer than plastic and that added rigidity means the blades are going to flex much less. And with that increased rigidity you gain the ability to make the blade to frame clearance much much tighter. Even probably tighter than what Nocttoy can do because these are still I mean it's a special plastic. It's a fancy plastic but it's still plastic and it's going to bend more than an aluminum blade.

[00:06:28]There's also an RGB version. I do not think that this is all metal. I think the frame's metal, but I had this open and I didn't see metal blades, which led me to believe that these weren't metal blades until I opened these ones up and I was like, whoa, they are. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:06:44]This is a metal frame, but the blades, the blades are just like they're more they look like the Noctua type plastic, but these have an LED in it. But if you want an all metal one, that one. No fancy RGB, but metal. So, yeah, let me know what you think. I would not normally put a consumer fan in the fan shutdown. I'd be interested to know what you guys think about this, but given that it's all metal, and you guys have talked about all metal fans in the past, this is unique. I thought, well, why not? They didn't really send it over for that, but when I got it, I was like, well, I guess we could see how it does.

[00:07:16]I don't really see myself putting any more commercial fans in the fan showdown. Uh, unless something else comes out. That's crazy because most fans you buy off the shelf are they're all pretty much the same.

[00:07:28]They look the same. They perform the same. You don't really find many bladeless fans on the market. But anyway, let's see how let's see how much air flow it has.

[00:08:03]Hey, Heat.

[00:08:37]Heat.

[00:08:54]In the sound test, the Bladeless Mark II came in around 46.4 dBA.

[00:09:03]The Cyclloid came in around 49.1.

[00:09:09]The Bazier came in around 51.3.

[00:09:16]The Nameless came in around 51.7 and the Cooler Master all metal A120 came in around 55.7.

[00:09:31]Performance-wise, with our specific testing for season 7, the Bazir came in fifth, the Bladeless Mark II came in fourth, the A120 in third, Nameless got second, and the Cyclloid came in first.

[00:09:41]And overall they finished 3rd, 8th, 13th, 16th, and 22nd. So, thank you guys all for watching.

[00:09:49]And like I said, if you have any ideas for what we should do for season 8, let me know in the comments down below because I have some ideas as well. And I want to see kind of where we're all at, what we're all thinking. And I'll see you in the next one. Hopefully sooner than later.