Installation

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As the NF-B9 comes complete with tool-less mounting pegs, you don’t have to train your wrist and drill the threads for the case screws. Of course, you could do this for whatever reason (most likely that you don’t want 4 brown circles on the outside of your case) and use the supplied silver case screws.

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The pegs are quite difficult to use and unless you’ve used them before you’ll spend a while figuring out the best way to get case and fan together. My way is to put all four into the case and then slot the fan on top and pull the pegs through. The jobs takes about 3 minutes if you know what you are doing.

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Testing

As we don’t have access to any kind of noise measuring device that can register to the level of the this fan even at stock, it’ll have to be the human ear test.

I found that at the stock speed the fan was audible, but at a much more satisfactory tone than compared to a fan of similar dBA output. Using either of the adaptors and you’ll have to come close to becoming Van Gogh before you’ll hear the familiar hum of the blade swishing through the air. More importantly, the fan pushes a lot more air than other fans of this size for the same noise output; I couldn’t find another 92mm fan that came close to the figures that Noctua list on the box.

You can use both the LNA and ULNA together (creating the Mega Ultra Low Noise Adaptor Zord) and the fan will begin to spin on its own which wasn’t possible for previous Noctua models to my knowledge. However, at this speed your PC will not only complain that its failed if you decide to use it for your CPU fan, but will move a similar amount of air as a gerbils breath so its not advisable to limit the fans speed to this level.

This fan is perfect for people yearning for quiet PC’s for their cases, or even their CPU coolers. I’ve seen many generic PC’s that use 92mm fans which are far too loud for what they are doing. Using one of these instead will cost you a little bit more cash, but will allow you to run your PC without the background hum.