Noctua NF-A8 PWM, Premium Quiet Fan, 4-Pin (80mm, Brown)

The Fan that’s missing in all the Alienware Aurora chassis design from r1-r12. The inside haven’t changed. Still lacking air cooling and only room for 1 liquid cooling radiator 120mm. If u running SLI you can’t install liquid cool gpu and ur gpu are literally facing the bottom of the case with no room for air. Only 1 fan is facing the back side of the GPU and that’s the front fan. One of the only 2 fans in this compacted case. They do come standard with up to 3000+rpm fans which is pretty impressive I give them that. But the noise is unbearable at that fan speed. So I switched it to noctua front Fans and got a bit more quiet but not much since I don’t spin the rpm high on the older ones anyways which doesn’t make much noise when it is t spinning crazy anyways, anyways I notice the side panels has ventilations on it and even seems like holes for you to mount a fan. So I bought one of these small 80mm fans to try it out and it worked it was pretty easy disconnect the metal chassis from the plastic cover it, a single clip like mechanism in the center held the entire thing together, ones I unlock the clip I just push and slide the metal plate off the plastic panel from the Aurora and begin installing the fan, funny thing is tho, ones I installed it I realized there is no extra 4 pins fan headers for u to plug in an extra fan unless u want to use the CPU fan header for the side panel fan or put the pump fan to the cpu header and then put the side panel fan to the pump fan, neither option was appealing to me, so I went to secret option number 3, I use the Y cable that came with the noctua 80mm pwn fan and plug my front fan and the side panel fan into it and use the front fan header since they fairly same location of the case and both noctua fans I figure it won’t be too big of a problem fingers crossed and it worked. Even tho they are different sizes and different RPM rating. Lol anyways check out the temp difference. I’m pretty happy with the mod I did on it, almost felt like Alienware should’ve included it from the begining. Also I think there is enough room to fit another 120mm liquid cooler in the front fan spot with a bit of dremel work u can cut out some of the excess metal chassis and some of the plastic in the front. That way u can liquid cool ur gpu and your cpu. I’m thinking I might do that one day just for fun. I don’t even play games on my computer now. I just like taking it apart and changing pc parts left and right just for fun and performance. Anyways yeah if u have an Aurora, get one of these, it’s good.

these fans are more quiet than the hard drives, I now need to figure out how to configure spindown on the drives on linux.

Very quiet

As quiet as they come. The colors are... well, Noctua colors. But Id trade looks for quiet any day in a fan.

Failed DOA

All honesty this fan was a direct fit onto my pc’s heat sync its improved cooling to my cpu by alot and is very easy to install into your pc

I recently started hearing a fan whine coming from my cpu cooler fan. Being since its a old Dell xps 8700 with a i7 4790. I didnt want to buy a cpu cooler for it since its never given me a heat issue. I was already planning to clean out the old thermal paste on it and decided to purchase this. I had already swapped out the rear fan about 2 years back with a noctua 92mm fan to help with the noise and improve thermals. Happy to say you dont hear it at all and noticing my cpu idling a little bit cooler with the stock heatsink attached.

Just like me small, very refreshing and silent

These are as quite as they are ugly and they are really quite! None of the provided mounting hardware worked for my application so be aware you might have to hit the parts bin to make these work.

All the online review I read called this an excellent fan, and I must agree. It keep my case cooler than the old fan, is definitely quieter, and looks and feels like a quality product. It comes with a 4-pin connector, so my motherboard can control the speed (thats what PWM means). It generally runs at about medium speed (1800 rpm), but my making a special effort to load up my system, I can get it step up to 2200 rpm- and its still silent.