SilverStone Air Penetrator AP123

For one of our SST-AP123 fans it was installed within a SilverStone Sugo SG09 chassis that housed an AMD FX-8150 Bulldozer CPU, MSI 760GM-P34(FX) motherboard, 4GB of RAM, 500GB SATA HDD, and a passively-cooled NVIDIA GeForce 8600GTS graphics card. The system was running Ubuntu 13.04 x86_64 with the Linux 3.8 kernel.

The SST-AP123 replaced the left intake fan on the Sugo SG09, which is a fan rated for 1200RPM at 22 dBA. The top of the chassis already comes with a pre-installed 180mm Air Penetrator fan.

The before and after thermal performance was compared using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software. The OpenBenchmarking.org test profiles were used of the Urban Terror and Xonotic games along with the C-Ray and Build Linux Kernel computational tests. During this testing, the Phoronix Test Suite automatically monitored the CPU temperature, GPU temperature, and system temperature for the hardware (this can be reproduced by setting the MONITOR=cpu.temp,sys.temp,gpu.temp environment variable and simply executing phoronix-test-suite benchmark urbanterror xonotic c-ray build-linux-kernel).

The results in full for this testing can be found on OpenBenchmarking.org within 1307074-PTS-AMDFX81532.

While the SST-AP123 was replacing an existing SilverStone fan of slightly lower performance, the GPU temperature of the passively cooled GeForce 8600GTS saw the best improvement. For the SG09 chassis the side intake fan is slightly out of line with the main PCI Express slot but this Air Penetrator fan did a nice job of lowering the GPU temp by an average of about 3°C. The system and CPU temperatures were roughly the same.

The noise level during operation was great (in terms of no additional noise while offering better performance) for the SST-AP123 fan when housed within the excellent Sugo SG09 chassis, also from SilverStone. The SilverStone Air Penetrator AP123 fan presently retails for around $18 USD, which some may view as high for a case fan, but the performance is good while at a low noise level and it's part of the SilverStone brand we've become to know and trust quite well over the years for delivering top-notch computer enthusiast products.