Silverstone FM82

Why is a fan such as this useful? Well of course it acts as a normal fan, spitting out 1800RPM, which is standard, and keeps things pretty cool. Using the fan controller, you can increase it to 3800RPM, at which point you will definitely hear it. At 1800, it’s barely audible. At 3800 however, it becomes sharper and you can hear it quite well. If your PC is the only thing going on in your room, you will definitely notice it; If you have other background noise you may not.

What you choose to do with the fan is likely completely different than what I do with mine. If you are not familiar with my recent ‘Ghetto Mods’, you are soon to be introduced. In our BFG 6800 GT review, I mentioned about how how hot the thing gets.. up to 90ºC at load. Well, my use was to mount the fan beneath the card facing towards the cooler as you can see in the picture below.

Well, as I expected, it did keep the card around 2ºC cooler than the previous fan that was ghetto modded there. When I began to turn the speed higher and higher though, it actually caused the card to rise in temperature. This is likely because the fan was pushing the hot air back at the card before it had a chance to escape. Depending on where you plan to use it in your case, you will have different results.

Overall, I love the fan. Just holding it, you can tell that the quality is there. Even though it isn’t fancy like some others on the market, it definitely has it’s own style. The cream color works, and on top of the quality, it’s definitely worth a buy. One thing to note, is that if you do not use the fan controller, the fan will automatically go the maximum speed. This makes the controller a necessity, unless you actually want it going full speed constantly.

I’d like to give a big thanks to SilverStone for sending us the fan for review. We will be taking a look at another SilverStone cooling product in the very near future as well.

Questions? Comments? Flames? Feel free to post anything in our related review thread. Registration is free, and always will be. You can even post without registering if you want to suck ;)