Hello everyone! Thomas here. Things are still going with the fan, it's just going slow. Thank you for your patience all this time! I'm not in a superyacht, at least yet c: I hope you're all having a wonderful day!

Even though the Acceleron placed last, in my mind it is the best design here. It is the only one that does not add extra shrouds and bulk which would not be functional inside an actual build and it had the lowest percentage loss of pressure when switching to the restricted setup of the radiator. Some of the other ones lost hundreds of CFM of flow where as the Acceleron barely lost anything.

Gotta have categories for future ones. The Acceleron got beat hard, but its also the only normal sized one. I suggest a slim 15mm, normal 25mm, extreme with shrouds and stuff, and then a fun category for anything that puts style before substance. Then I also recommend we chart the results between noise and airflow and do a noise normalized test.

I like the idea of performance based points. Baseline is the A12X25 = 100%. All others would be based on its baseline. This would allow for rating based on actual performance of each fan regardless of the competition per episode. Thanks for keeping this going!

I think redoing some of the geared fans in resin might be a fun episode. FDM gears (especially small gears) are very noisy, typically have quite high friction, and are mechanically weaker than resin, once cured fully. I think, even if none of them actually bring real competition to the table, just seeing them work a little better and not explode in your face would be pretty entertaining.

IDENTIFY YOURSELF THOMASS! All jokes aside its always a good day when a fan showdown happens

I've been super curious about Thomas' fan ever since then too.

Resin prints just look so clean They almost look manufactured

Please can you test the velocity stacks you have with a stock A12x25? It would be super interesting to see if just adding the stacks to off the shelf fans could improve case airflow/cooling.

This was sweet! As others have mentioned, while I think the shrouds are cool in terms of pushing boundaries, I personally enjoy episodes a lot more when there's no extra assemblies on the height of the fans, because most cases wouldn't support their installation. Granted, generally I doubt people are cannibalizing A12x25's anyways, but I could absolutely see a world in which a company does produce a fanless hub designed for custom 3d prints, there's obviously a big community of us. In any case, the testing methodology of including both radiator and non-radiator testing would be excellent to include in future episodes if it's not too onerous!

I'm not a long term follower of the channel but your passion and joy at the pursuit of an engineering design quest is just SO entertaining. Keep on doing what you're doing.

Yeah baby! 😀 😀 I'm expecting some prices for this 😀😀 I honestly had no idea my Cheater will be this successful, but I'm so happy to see how much of a topic it is in your show 🙂

“More than enough to fit anything you guys can come up with.” challenge accepted.

Such a damn good format for this video! Perfect amount of commentary and storytelling!

Didn’t know I wanted to see this, but this was awesome. Thanks for going the extra mile to make such an awesome vid!

great to see my fan on the show again, thanks for the test we've all been waiting for. I'm not surprised I got 3rd because I optimized that fan for air coolers. I do think that that could have been a nice additional test but I'm glad the community got their answer. Thanks again major, keep up the good work

I wanna thank you for being so dedicated and hard working this whole time, been here since season one and I want MOAR!

I miss the rpm and noise lvl in the challenge, that would have an additional impact on the variety of possible points and possibly ranks?! Love the content. Waiting four the next 😊

I only found this channel a few months ago, but I'm glad I did. It's great content. I love the delivery and vibe.

This is truly what we have been waiting for. Thank you!

Honestly, please, just don't stop! Love the content. Love having breakfast with Major Hardware!

Awesome. Nice to see the two-factor evaluation. Those are some great fans.

youre one of the few youtubers who i dont mind rambling 😄 love ur work!

This gives a lot of great info based on what use someone has for the fan. Glad you did both testing and you see strengths and weaknesses.

This is great the resin printer really helped, and increased the unswirlers fan blade quality. I am extremely satisfied with my design because it achieved more than I anticipated it would ever achieve.

That Einstein head is crazy! I love the comparison between airflow and static pressure, it's really interesting to see how the positions shifted, especially the Slug Mk2

I love the content of this video. I always love the fan showdown, but this video is possibly one of the best you've done

Great episode! I really liked the resin printed fans vs. FDM, so much cleaner looking!

This has been the best reality tv show ever. Multiseason arcs, real tension, teams forming in the crowd, and real tests to determine winners, not voting.

I love this ranking system! It's a little more work for you but I think it certainly paints a clearer picture of the winner.

I love the championship matchup! As an idea, average feet/min between both tests may be more fair than points for 1st, 2nd, etc. If a fan barely loses in one round it can skew the final results.

Best original series on yt. Loving it 💜

Excellent!!

Bro im soo happy to see that you did it❤

Hey James, I love your videos, and I'm excited to see that you've gotten into resin 3D printing now! It makes total sense for fan-testing! I still wanted to make sure you're informed about the health risks of resin printing. I know the community isn't always very open about this, but based on my own experience, these risks should NOT be ignored! Allergies, irritation, and other issues can be quite serious, and it's important to consider the cumulative effects over time... But I'm sure you're well aware of this, and I'm looking forward to more of your resin printed fan showdowns - Take care! Cheers

FAVORITE VIDEO EVER THANK YOU SO MUCH

HEY! I just suggested this last week! Thank you!

woot glad to see the resin reprints of the "best"

I think there should be an isolation of the fans from shroud assemblies. The fans tested in isolation, and the shrouds tested with a control group fan- perhaps a stock A12x?

You actually filled your water loop all of the way on the O11 XL, thank you now seeing the half filled distro plate wont distract me anymore, lol, great video again, love this series.

Finally! Excellent video! A couple things of note.. Elegoo's ABS-Like Plast Based Resin is absolutely phenomenal. Easy to print, low fumes, decent strength. After testing dozen or so resins from 6 or 7 manufacturers, it's the way to go. Resin printing is lots of fun, but make sure you're being safe. Please ensure that you have correct ventilation when resin printing, especially when you are pulling prints or filling the vat. Plant based or not, the liquid resin and fumes are extremely toxic and likely carcinogenic, especially with regular exposure. Safety glasses and nitrile gloves when there is any potential for exposure to uncured resin and either good ventilation (force fresh air in, bad air out) or wear a proper respirator or even both. A proper 500+ square foot air purifier with proper HEPA filter (not the cheap Chinese ones) is a good idea to run in a basement room with limited ventilation. I run my resin printers in Creality FDM enclosures with ducting directly outside using a 140mm fan at each end of the duct, use printed TPU gaskets to keep the fumes in the box, printed resin vat covers for when not in use, and let the prints drip off for at least 8 hours before retrieving a new print. Your videos are great, but no amount of views is worth taking years off your life! There are no long term studies on the effects, but the short term studies aren't very confidence inspiring to say the least. I hate to be that guy and maybe you're already doing some of this stuff, but I've seen a lot of bad health practices in the past six months. Keep up the hard work! Looking forward to the next one!

i think my favorite thing about your videos other than the obvious pursuit of hoemade fans... is the "whose line is it anyway" approach to seasons

Oh boy this exciting

Excellent vid.

I would like to see what a 3d printed case with airflow in mind would look like. I'd think i'd be fun to see how it could be done on small print beds and assembled

I hope you keep resin printing, how smooth it comes out is a big part of it.

I finally got into 3D printers enough to consider buying one, then I saw this video recommended to me, so I binged the whole series. PC's, 3D printing, custom fans, AND real world testing? That's just so cool.

This was a very fun video and it was awesome to see the Cheater retake it's rightful place at the top.

Man those prints are insanely clean.

Would have liked to see the stock A12x25 also in the charts. Cheater still the reigning champion

that eifel tower looked a bit bigger than an inch to me

you are all nuts. and i love it.

I got a design in my head but I just down have the skillset or time to actually make it. But I so love watching all these videos. super fun!

I really like this choice for measurement, those two variables tell a lot of what they can really do in real scenarios

If i can give a few tips for this beast, the sunlu abs is real nice in smell and strength! Will help with the warping problems. Heating up the resin before you start printing also gonna give you a better time. Glad you got it printing :)

Thank you for reading the comments and doing both tests

GLAD you did it

To the Author, i 'finally' got to see the Cheetah!😅😅 thanks heaps, love your show💙

Great video!

This video is very super good.

Nice. Love resin.

Casual viewer here, and big fan of the Banks youtube channel. Recently they did a video on flow bench that may be applicable to this testing. Ultimately what we care about is how many molecules of air we're shoving past the rad. So we don't so much care about volume flow, we care about mass flow. What you could do is build a simple arduino device that displays a reading from an automotive mass air flow sensor placed inside your tube (not sure how that would be scaled). You could also add an aperature style oriface where you could measure the fan's mass flow performance at different pressure ratios. Of course it would be worthwhile to characterize the flow through a radiator, case, and blower cooler to have some pressure ratio test points.

The points remove the ability to see by what margin they differ. For the rest, a wonderful video as usual.

thank you for topping up your distroblock haha! also, holy crap the cheater is just unbeatable!

Maybe you could start testing the fans, using a radiator, but inside a case, which would be the actual use of it in the real world. Love the channel, been watching it for years :)

My hero :)

I feel the accelleron is fighting outside its weight class, its like trying to compare a 1 slot GPU cooler vs a 4 slot GPU cooler, obviously the bigger one is going to do better but the fact that this fan works NEARLY as well as the others without all the extra intakes or exhausts or space required is pretty amazing. I look forward to being able to buy one sometime in the future.

this is so cool, no pun intended

For a next season, I'd like to see a contest for the most silient fan. But that can't be the only criteria, since 'no blades' will probably win... 😉 Another criteria could be something weird like turbulence. (Although I have no idea how to measure this...)

more resin prints! the more i watch the results of resin printing the more my brain starts to be less bothered by the intoxication from resin smell 😂

I’m sad there was no awesome music montage of the fan smoke tests ;-; that’s the hype train of this whole series!

I LOVE my elegoo Jupiter. Great printer

Oooh yea now thats smoooth.

From a pure performance standpoint, I can understand the big intake/exhaust shroud pieces help. They prep the flow air flow in a more ideal way; similar to a trumpet in a high performance engine's air intake system. However, it's not ideal in an actual use case. They're just too large for use in a housing that isn't designed for them. I'd like to see what the Acceleron could do with an intake shroud, or how much is lost from the other 3 without their shrouds.

I like the way you say produced haha

That printer does amazing quality prints! That Eiffel Tower was impressive. The price for it seems absolutely reasonable, but I'm saying that as someone whose familiarity with 3D printers begins and ends with Fan Showdown. If I felt like I had anything interesting to model and make, I'd probably splurge on that printer.

The resin prints are smooth and stable. Maybe it's time to have people start designing a new fan frame that you can toss the Noctua motor into and see if any leaps can be made on that front.

Resin prints look so good. How about you try to make hybrids of these 4 fans. Combining them in some way to make a mutant juggernaut of a fan. Combine aspects of the 4 fans into one fan and test them against the original fans. 😅 that would be cool idea.

The intakes/exhausts sure make a great difference ... but how much exactly? Could you test these "addons" on the A12x25 to give us a reference point? Cool work with the new printer! Cheers

The odor-free resin is quite tolerable even without a filter. I was BLOWN AWAY when I first got my resin printer too. I did the same Einstein bust and it was hard to believe such detail could be produced.

With the insane detail capabilities of the Elgoo, would love to see some large articulating prints. Make a custom sculpture, paint it, do a giveaway!

thanks

I LOVE my Anycubic M3 MAX resin printer... The shipping, had it secured in a massive ammount of cut foam that everything fit night and tight, and around the foam it had an angle iron peices creating a square cage around protecting ALL sides and corners... I have the carbon filters for the smell and the auto fill bottles... So you pure 1kg of resin in the trey, then take a second bottle and put the autofill cap on it and hook it up to the pump... anytime the resin starts to get low, it auto fills it... printer never runs out!! Switching resins is a PAIN at that scale, but got big seringas to extract, because pouring is messy....

My favorite fan still is the the fanfan. Huge fanfan-fan. Waiting for the fanfan2...or fanfares....

I'd never thought I'd be a fan of a fan, but here we are...

It would be fun to have the designers of the Cheater and Unswirler colab and try to combine the two into one ultimate fan.

You should try to separate fan types when you compare them. When you add the shrouds it becomes a different type of fan and it's not a fair comparison as it's not usable for regular computer builds. The acceleron was the only normal computer fan there and I'd rather see a comparison between other normal dimensioned fans.

14:17 I would even say : It is resin again to the top of the pile.

I'd like to see you test the various intake/outlet designs with each fan, and then figure out which of those is best and make them a standard part of testing, so that each fan is tested alone and with intake/outlet adapters. Part of the cheater's success could well be the conical inlet, standard for turbofan intakes. Different means of "unswirling" are also possible, and the most common "flow straightener" seems to be a honeycomb-which nobody has yet tested, probably because they _seem_ like they'd impede airflow to some extent. Anyway, testing every fan with and without a common intake/outlet could provide some interesting information, and would level the playing field, rather than relying on participants simply deigning to design one each time. We all know they work, but they still take up material and space.

Been watching a bunch of car tuning stuff. Pretty sure the reason the shrouds work is because they allow the air to organize on it's way to the fan. Meaning the low pressure zone the blades create is a little behind each blade but further UP the tube than in in the path. Something like that could be why the acceleron works also because that lightning bolt pattern may help organize and optimize the low pressure zones it's blades create.

Visuals are huge. I am imagining a clear tube, a foam ball and a fan at each end. Let the fans rip and see which one can push the ball to the others side. I know it may not provide a ton of raw data, but that 1v1 visual could really make things interesting.

Wait a minute, first FDM, now resin, what's next? DMLS? I love the content, Thank you!

Decent Elegoo ad, and the printer does look like pretty decent too. Mine would be out in the garage though, because all that resin crap is toxic.

I think the difference between the two runs would actually be a better metric to see which is more efficient. Which would put the Slug Mk. 2 in first with 119, the Acceleron in second with 137, the Cheater in third with 234, and the Unswirler in fourth with 330.

Just discovered this channel. Really interesting concept of testing various fan designs. Would it be possible to test the scalability of these designs. Maybe have the standard size using the noctua fan housing and a larger and smaller design. Unsure how this would be accomplished but maybe some sort of 3D printed funnel-like adapter to attach to the wind tunnel and then the scaled fan on the other end?

i love fans

Atlast! Resin! 😍😍😍

Came for the fans, not the paid 5 minute commercial for a printer

What I'm most excited for is when you're going to move from the slow hub to like a 3000 RPM one. I guess you could use the Noctua NF-F12 industrialPPC-3000 PWM or a Scythe Ultra Kaze, although they both might have different hub diameters.

let's see some resin prints of the complex helical gear fans that were too messy with the other prints