UMLan

GELID Solutions has been out on the market for a few year and is a relatively new company but don't let that stop you from checking out their products. Today we are privileged to take a look at new fan from GELID Solutions WING 12 PL. WING 12 PL is equipped with Nanoflux bearing which provides frictionless operation of the impeller. This help greatly in reduction of noise. One of the signature specification of this particular fan is that it is able to be connected to pwm circuit for maximum performance. Lets take a close look at WING 12 PL and see what other goodies it has.

WING 12 PL (FN-FW12PL-18)
Silent 120mm PWM Fan with LED

The WING 12 PL features a unique Nanoflux bearing which ensures a friction-free and silent operation. Thanks to the clever design and magnetic bearing the impeller can be detached for an easy cleaning. Additionally fan blade winglets were designed to achieve larger airflow and greater static pressure. Thank to GELID’s Nanoflux Bearing the impeller can be detached and the fan blades can be cleaned easily.

a) Key Features of Nanoflux Bearing (NFB)
The Nano-technology composite ensures lowest abrasion and extreme durability (MTTF 100’000 hours). Compared to other Magnetic bearings this technology allows the impeller to be detached and thus the fan blades can be cleaned easily.

Caption: The material of the Nanoflux bearing is self lubricating

b) Nanoflux Bearing (NFB) compared to sleeve and ball bearings
Even though conventional sleeve and ball bearings currently dominate the fan market however both have their disadvantages. While sleeve bearings have very low noise emissions and are very cost effective, they tend to leak oil; once the oil has dissipated the fan can no longer operate. Ball bearings, on the other hand, while providing longer operating life are costlier, noisier and are prone to damage.
GELID’s Nanoflux bearing uses magnetic flux to limit contact and friction between the bearing and the shaft. High precision self-lubricated material eliminates oil leakage. The result is a ultra quiet long life bearing.

PWM Control & LED Light

Both models include a PWM Control which keeps the fan silent if no additional cooling is necessary but increases the fan speed whenever additional cooling is required. To give the fans a unique color, a white LED light is embedded into the 120mm green WING 12 PL fan.

MSRP: USD 19.00

*Green WING 12 PL is currently not available or for sale in EU countries.

Now that we got basic information out of the way, lets take a closer look at WING 12 PL.

WING 12 PL comes in two colors, blue and green. Today we are going to look at the green model. WING 12 PL comes in a very unique packaging as most of it is clear and could be looked trough. There are no tricks to this fan and everything is pretty much right there for you if you are looking for a colored case fan. From the front side of the WING 12 PL we can clearly see the GELID Solutions logo and WING 12 PL logo if you will. Not much information there, but we did found plenty of info on the back side of the packaging. There are so many features that you can easily get lost in them. What made an impression is that the impeller could be removed for cleaning. Further in the review we will take a look at the impeller itself.

Contents of the package consist of four fan screws, four vibration compensators, a GELID Solutions sticker and WING 12 PL itself. WING 12 PL is a 120 mm fan which looks to be made out of some kind of ABS plastic. The actual base of it is very shiny and looks to be very light in weight. The actual impeller of WING 12 PL is UV active and should look great in any case.

There are four LED's which are build in the case of the fan. We didn't find any wires or lose ends and this is a big plus. The little LED's are very bright and provide maximum lumens for this type of fan. As we mentioned earlier in our review, WING 12 PL is a PWM fan which allows it to spin anywhere from 600 to 1800 rpm and generate anywhere from 10 db(A) to 26.8 db(A). We will include a small reference sonar scale so you can see how quiet WING 12 PL is at maximum speeds.

The PWM cable length is 50 cm or roughly 20 inches, well enough to reach any place on your motherboard. If you do not have a spare slot for PWM fan, you could always purchase a splitter. Please remember that not all motherboards come with PWM functionality. Check your motherboard manual for PWM support. WING 12 PL has some unique blade design. I cant say that i have seen anything like this before in a fan. I am going to go a head and assume that these wing adjustments aid in the amount of air is being pushed trough.

We have removed the impeller just to show you that it can be done. Why would you ask you need to remove the impeller? Well if you are a geek then you would know that even though the fan is in pretty much constant motion, it collects dust and needs to be cleaned. With WING 12 PL impeller you can take it off and rinse it under the water but be sure to dry it completely before reinserting it in to the socket.

Installing WING 12 PL was rather simple. You can choose to use either mounting screws or vibration compensators to mount WING 12 PL. We have used mounting screws for an ease of the installation. Installing fans with vibration compensators could be difficult especially near cpu cooler. Once we have powered on our system we got a soft green glow from the uv blades. Very stylish.

The whole installation took less than 5 minutes and we were on our was to test this unit.

We have a pretty loud system and over all we get about 57 db(A) while in idle state. We have took this reading in a basement without the any of our loud switches or nas. The basement by itself is about 30 db(A) without anything running in it. When we have installed the WING 12 PL we didn't see any change in our sonar levels. This is a good news as we can clearly see that WING 12 PL does not increase the sonar levels, overall. I was impressed as how much air this fan was pushing. Unfortunately there is no signal wire for use to mount and monitor the rpm's as the PWM kicks in. Just to see how loud our testing rig really is here is a reference graph of sonar levels.

To be honest i wasn't expecting WING 12 PL to show us anything extra ordinary until i actually took a good look at this fan. There are many fans out there and picking the right one could be a pain. GELID Solutions did a great job engineering and marketing this product and it deserves a close look. WING 12 PL has many features which could be highly beneficial in the current market. One of the signature aspects of WING 12 PL is the Nanoflux Bearing or NFB. This patented bearing uses a magnetic flux to limit friction between part and the self lubricated material its made from helps to eliminate oil leakage, therefore resulting in long lasting operation of the fan. How long would you ask, about 100 000 of working hours, operating under 40C. This is not all that WING 12 PL has to offer. The silent operation and ability to work with PWM really helps out in building a silent pc. On top of WING 12 PL being quiet it has ultra bright LED's which reflect off the UV impeller to provide us with a nice and soft glow of green or blue. Great product. Highly recommended.