be quiet! Silent Wings Pro 4 PWM, 120mm

Die High-End-Lüfter von be quiet! gibt es nun in vierter Generation. Die Silent Wings 4 sollen sowohl leise als auch besonders leistungsstark arbeiten können. Wir haben zum Start sowohl die Silent Wings 4 in den high-speed-Ausführungen als auch die Top-Modelle Silent Wings Pro 4 120mm PWM und Silent Wings Pro 4 140mm PWM getestet.

be quiet! pride themselves on having some of the coolest and quietest products on the market, and based on my experience with their latest flagship fans, that is clearly still true. These are some incredibly quiet fans, even more so when you consider how high their maximum RPM is! Quiet fan companies often take a cheeky approach by simply using slower-speed fans, thus giving you less noise at the cost of overall cooling performance. With the be quiet! Silent Wings Pro 4 fans, you still get the low-RPM goodies you expect from quiet fans. However, with their high-speed and ultra-high-speed fan modes, you can really push some truly massive airflow. Sure, they’re noisier in these modes, but compared to other fans on the market of a similar speed, they’re comparatively quiet. Of course, using PWM connectors, just because you enable the Ultra High Speed mode, they won’t always spin at that speed, and you’ll still need to set your fan curves on your motherboard or controller software, however, you choose to do it, this is an important step. This will ensure you can get the whisper-quiet performance benefits when you’re working or watching YouTube instead of actually working, but when it comes to gaming on a hot day, the fans have plenty of boost to ensure your performance is maintained. The build quality is also exceptional, and while the fans are quite expensive, the overall quality of the product really speaks to why they cost what they do. The fact that they’re somewhat modular is pretty cool too, I’ve never seen swappable corners like this, and while it may not seem like a big difference, any performance gains are certainly welcome when using them as case fans or on a cooler.

I came real close to awarding be quiet! an Editor's Choice award for the Silent Wings Pro 4 120 mm fans. After all, there is little to complain about when it comes to the actual product. It's a good update to an already successful fan that still hangs in there today, so be quiet! had their work cut out for them to find avenues for improvement. The company could have gone the LCP composition route akin to the likes of Phanteks and Tt or even gone thicker to simply get physics on its side. Instead, the Silent Wings 4 lineup has multiple tiny changes that all add up positively. We have a clean black-on-black aesthetic with no RGB LEDs to be seen for those who couldn't care less about it. But then we have a few unnecessary—in my opinion anyway—accessories to make for a feature that I will never make use of. I also can't help thinking whether those tiny gaps between the replacement corners and the fan frame would hurt performance ever so slightly. We are at a point where there is little to distinguish this fan from other top contenders for your money when it comes to the performance-to-noise ratio as it is. The Silent Wings Pro 4 gets all the basics executed to near perfection. There is a noise-less fluid dynamic bearing which will work fine in any orientation and promises longevity, to where you will be more likely to get bored and buy new fans in a few years, rather than needing to replace a failed unit. The five-years of warranty also go a long way to persuade customers to go with be quiet!, as will the part where the fan motors are more efficient than usual, consuming less power. The standard 25 mm thickness also means you can use radiator screws as-is and also not worry about whether these will fit inside your case. Having a single cable per fan also keeps cable management tidy, although I would have liked to see some form of daisy-chaining system included similar to some of the competition. This would have been all the more obvious had there been multi-pack SKUs, but instead we have to shell out a tear-jerking $31 per fan. It's purely for this higher cost that I can't get myself to give the Silent Wings Pro 4 our top award, but I have zero problems with recommending it for DIY watercooling.

The performance of the 120 mm Silent Wings Pro 4 is supreme. The first sentence of the evaluation can’t sound any other way. Whatever the application, an overall contender for this fan is hard to find. On radiators, regardless of thickness and FPI, it always holds the top spots among the fans tested so far across the entire speed spectrum. And at low speeds, which are optimal for this fan, even with a good margin. That’s both against the Silent Wings 3, which also achieved the best price-to-noise ratio at low speeds, and with the structurally similar MSI Silent Gale P12. That fan outperforms the BeQuiet! only in very rare cases.