Enermax Marathon Enlobal Fan

With this Enermax fan you can completely take the blades off, completely soak it in soap and water to clean it off, hand dry it with a towel, and then stick it back in your case clean as ever (meanwhile taking a wet rag and simply wiping the dusty areas of the fan encasement for any stuck to the body). Do not forget to do all this cleaning while the fan is unplugged.

The old CRE AIR 120mm fan that we are comparing to runs at 2200rpm's at 39Db's and uses 4.8w (12v @ .4 amps) to push 84CFM. The Enermax fan runs at 900-1100rpm's at 17Db's and uses 2.4w (12v @ .2 amps) to push 44CFM. The fact alone that the Enermax fans only uses half the electrical power as the other 120mm fan is another reason why it is quieter. The Enlobal bearings ultimately may not do an amazing job keeping the fan this quiet, but the additional fact that the fan uses less power to spin around (and therefore less RPM's) also contributes to the quieter operation.

Now that we know what it does, and how it measures up to a run of the mill 120mm fan, we can see how well this lives up to Enermax's claims. The fan is claimed to be a quiet case fan that lasts along time, it runs friction free, and that it is very easy to clean. In testing it out to see how 17Db compared to the rest of the computer, it was silent! You could not hear it over the normal running noises of a computer. While testing only lasted a few hours we cannot outright tell you if it is long lasting or friction free. With the physical construction that we observed, the performance we saw in the test, and the idea behind this fan, we see no reason to think it wouldn't last a very long time and be lacking almost all friction during it's operation. Since the blades were removable and able to be completely isolated from the electrical components, it made it much easier to clean. Cleaning the fan about every month (depending on how dusty your computing environment is) will also help to contribute to its silent, frictionless and long operating life. You would not have to worry at all about getting water on the wrong places as long as you dried the bladed part off and then attached it to the base. Enermax's website makes an interesting claim regarding its ability to handle watery situations:

"This superior technology offers a longer lifetime as well and can even work under water and therefore be cleaned without damage. This tremendous effect was shown at Cebit 2006."

With that said, we felt obligated to deliver such results to continue in our most-detailed GNU/Linux hardware reviews. For this, we setup a small experiment, and had run the Enermax Marathon fan while it was completely submerged in water, and guess what? No problems! It of course isn't recommend to try to reproduce our experiment, since water and electricity don't mix, and it can potentially prove to be fatal to your valuable components, or even yourself. The Enermax Marathon had run completely submerged in water for several minutes, and while it had spun slower due to the added resistance of the water, it continued to churn with no sign of problems.