 That's how you upgrade a computer, right? With the purchase of a qualifying Intel processor, SSD, or NUC, you could instantly win an Intel gaming jersey and be entered in the draw for the Ultimate System. Click now to learn more. Linus and I like our premium fans, and we're both quite public about being fans of Noctua. And with pretty good reason. Noctua is able to boast extremely high build quality, great thermal performance, and very low operating decibel levels. Lately, they've even addressed the issue of their kinda puke brown problem by introducing their Redux and especially their industrial PPC line of fans, which I'm a big fan of. But they're pretty crazy expensive if you think about it. In many cases, people are buying these premium fans to replace fans that are already installed in their case, or that come with a radiator by default. Is it really worth it though? Does the price per performance value of swapping your fans really make any sense in this case? Or should we be more focused on investing in different parts of our computer? We decided to find out. Let's start with our test setup. We have an NZXT H440 with its default fan setup of three 120mm fans in the front and one 140mm fan in the back. Then we have a Corsair H105 with its two default 120mm fans strapped to it up in the top of the case, which will be cooling an i7-4930K. When we switch to Noctua fans, we'll be replacing all of the 120mm fans with NFF12s, and we will replace the 140mm fan in the back with an NFA14. First off, we have our thermal testing. Our 4930K is running at stock, and as per usual, our idle test will be ran with minimal processes running in the background. Our load test is ran with Prime95 running small MFFT mode, just to stress out the CPU a little bit and get that heat flowing. In both thermal and audio test cases, the fans are running at about 1100rpm for the stock and Noctua aftermarket fans. Secondly, we have the audio test case. This was done by shutting off everything in range that could make noise. That means straight up unplugging pretty much all electronics in the area, and even going as far as unplugging the fridge that was on the floor below, just because it was slightly too close. I then set up our Xtech digital sound level meter and recorded it with a camera just to make sure everything went okay, as I wanted to leave the room just in case the sound meter would pick up my breathing. So essentially, yeah, there was an improvement, awesome! But maybe not the $204 worth of improvement that you were hoping to get. This money could easily be shifted into other parts of your computer for a more noticeable performance improvement in most cases. A lot of things in the computer modding world aren't exactly worth it in a price per performance sense, and while I can sit here and bash on performance fans, there are other culprits as well. Do it yourself water cooling isn't exactly the biggest reward for your investment either, especially if you're a fan of buying premium components. And this brings me to the conclusion. I've known what the results of this test would yield for quite a while, and I'm sure many of you watching knew as well. But that doesn't stop people like Linus and I from water cooling our computers and outfitting them with top of the line fans, and other stuff like that. But this doesn't exactly have the greatest price per performance ratios, and that's okay with us. If you're on a tight budget and trying to build a gaming rig that will ultimately live under your desk, you should probably just focus on your core components in this case. If you're a fan of performance components and essentially the computer version of a hot rodder, then it's probably fine for you to torture your wallet a little bit and invest in premium stuff like premium fans and water cooling. Alright guys, so what do you think of premium setups? Are you into that? Are you just buying like extremely gaming optimized ones that are as low cost as you can get while getting the highest performance out of it that you can get? Let me know in the comments down below while you're down there, like, favorite, dislike, subscribe, share, all that kind of stuff. And if you want to do that in another place as well, jump over to the forum and do it there. And if you don't like the ads, become a contributor as normal. If you want a shirt for some reason, check the link in the description down below and you can get an awesome looking shirt there. I think we have our better than useless shirts on sale there. I know a guy that actually works here recently bought one, so that's pretty cool. Thanks for watching and I'll see you guys next time.