Installation

The product comes flat-packed; Ikea style. However, much unlike Ikea, all the pieces are there and crafting together this cooler is a breeze.

The brackets that you get have 4 mounting holes where you attach the 70mm fans and the grills. The picture below shows the difference between an 80mm grill (left) and the supplied 70mm grills (right).

The fans spin at 3500rpm and are surprisingly thin at only 15mm. However, being so thin, the fan blade pitch is lower meaning higher noise to CFM ratio. They run at 27.9 CFM and just below 30 dB, meaning a total of 83 CFM, these fans definitely pump out a fair old breeze. This isn’t horrendous, but when you compare it to an Akasa 120mm fan running at 1400RPM, 44.8 CFM and 18 dB you see a big difference. Akasa has 2.5 CFM per dB, whereas these fans have about 1 CFM per dB. Obviously this is going to be the case but worth pointing out all the same. The reason why these fans are so thin is to cut down the number of compatibility problems with people’s cases. If the fans were standard size then they would not be able to fit into the spaces where they are needed.

The fans themselves sport the Jetart logo on the front, whether or not they were made by Jetart is another matter. They connect to a molex cable with 3 female fan leads coming of it. A fan sensing lead comes off each fan but they are quite pointless if you use the provided connector. It might be of more use to someone who has a fan controller.

The fans have 4 LED’s in the outer casing that are blue and green, contrary to what the publicity picture at the start of this review shows. The LED’s give the product a good look when they are turned on and provide a nice aura to your case; important for people with window cases. The wires that connect these LED’s to the fans power are covered by a rather ugly looking blue opaque piece of tape.

My main gripe with this tape is that it covers up the usual inscribed airflow direction indicator. This means that the user has to hook them up to their rig to see which way they are pushing air before assembly can begin. This becomes more annoying when you realise how difficult it is to get the screws for these fans in. The glossy blue finish is put on after the screw holes are tapped being that the screw threads are filled with the paint. I couldn’t screw in the screws first time with a hand screwdriver; instead I had to whip out my trusty Bosch PSR 120 to do the job. Even with this I struggled. However, once the screw threads are cleared, installation is a breeze. It annoys me thought that all Jetart have to do is rearrange their production method, i.e. to paint, and then tap the screw holes. Although it didn’t stop my installation, it might for people who do not have access to a power screwdriver.

I decided that the best way to mount the fans was to have one at the end of the card blowing directly along it to the back of the case, and the other two blowing full pelt at the GPU.

On my graphics card, which granted is only a Radeon 9200 256mb, the GPU is more or less directly in the middle of the card. Obviously this is where I want the most airflow. Unfortunately, the 3D cooler does not allow you to have a fan mounted in the middle and another one on the bottom; i.e. I would only be able to have 27 CPM directly at the GPU, or 54 CFM pointed in its general direction. This annoyed me again, but I could always use the other bracket and have air running at the HS in a different direction.

Whilst installing the brackets, I realised how fragile they were and I could bend them quite easily; especially where they thin around the fan holes. All that is need to stop this is some bending that would increase their strength greatly. However, strength is not a great problem once the fans are installed.

Once I had installed the fans and the brackets, putting them into the computer was easy. There are small clips on the bottom of the main bracket that hug a spare PCI slot and then the usual backing plate screw is used to hold it all secure. By using a system that holds on using a PCI slot, the effective time span that this product can be used in is reduced. Your run-of-the-mill PCI slots are slowly being ousted in favour of the faster PCI-e version that this product would simply not work with.