Akasa 80mm Glowing Fans for Case Pimping

---

You've seen them in your friends computer, on half a dozen websites, and now you're checking them out here. They are the infectiously popular LED impregnated glowing fans that I swore to myself I would never "review." And if I can just direct you eyes up the title of this article you will see that this is clearly labeled "Akasa 80mm Glowing Fans for Case Pimping." So there you have it - this isn't a review!

Now, getting back to the two funky little Akasa fans in question from Lapicon.co.uk (they can be bought at TheOverclockingStore.co.uk). There are two types; the first with four blue LED's (AK-170BL4BC) and the second with multicoloured lights (AK-170RA4S) of which there is one blue, green, red, and orange LED.

Of the two types of fans the all Blue coloured fan looks the best IMHO, and comes with a small rheostat so you can even control the RPM speeds and thus noise levels.

The multicoloured fan also looks cool, but the orange LED is pretty much drowned out by the rest of the lights. What these fans do that makes them so unique is glow. That glow is ideal for case modder looking to add that special touch to a case, power supply, or even a heatsink. We did a quick check with the fans in the back of a Vantec Aluminum power supply and they do look frighteningly cool as you can see from the shots below.

Depending on the orientation of the fan you'll get a different effect as the light hits the clear plastic impeller in different ways. From the front, with the fan blowing down, or in, you get a sort of helical pattern that looks reminiscently like the head of a four-fluted drill bit. With the fans flipped over so they are blowing up, you get a more subtle effect where the light is diffused over the entire area.

Depending on your cooling requirements or personal taste, you can mix and match the orientation to suite. Akasa include a Molex pass thru cable and a set of mounting screws with each of the fans. Fan grills aren't included, and aren't really all that necessary unless you have a lot of stray cables flying around the inside of a case for instance.

The four colour 80mm fan produces about 40.5 dB of noise as was measured in a real world test. The fan consumes 1.3W of power.	The blue version of the 80mm fan was measured under the same conditions and produced between 35.5dB to 52.1dB depending on how fast the fan was rotating. While they look identical, the blue fan consumes 4.2W of power.

The Blue version of the fan (shown on the right above) comes with a small potentiometer on a cable so the voltage going to the fans motor can be adjusted. By dropping the voltage you slow down the fan, and thus the noise it makes. Neither of these 80mm fans are particularly noisy, but if you really want a low noise case fan, you at least have that option.

Slowing down the fan doesn't affect the coolness of the lights in any way, so its pretty easy to tone down the airflow without worrying. Compared to a few of the other manufacturers fans which are do similar things, the Akasa fans have two redeeming qualities we like. The first is of course that they come with mounting hardware and Molex pass thru cables. The second is that the electronics are wrapped in a strip of yellow heat shrink tubing to protect them from possible damage. And there you have it, Glowing Akasa 80mm case cooling fans; pretty, clear, coloured fans that glow brightly in the case and give your computer a little extra bit of class.