Performance

For testing my focus was on the overall noise performance of the Uni Fan P28s, I would love to confirm the airflow numbers that Lian Li has listed but we don’t have the equipment for that. I will say however that the 3 and 6 fan testing had so much airflow that I struggled to keep the fans standing up during our tests. Being able to link them together is part of this, but is also the amount of airflow as well as the pressure that the fans can produce.

For the noise testing, I ran tests with one fan, 3 fans, and all six fans running and this did end up showing one issue that I will get to in just a minute. Then for each round of tests, I tested at 100% fan speed and 50% fan speed using the motherboard controller. Then with the fan speed set to 100% again I tested with the included in-line fan controller on the medium and low settings, the high setting is just the 100% fan speed so all three are tested. I also documented the fan RPM for each test. The 2600 RPM fan speed that the P28s are listed at wasn’t ever reached, the fastest they ran for me was 2566 RPM on the 1 and 3 fan speed tests. With one fan the P28 came in at 44.9 decibels for that test, adding two more fans brought that up to 50.7, and with 6 fans in total it was 54.4 dB. The issue I noticed was when running 6 fans all linked together the RPMs were lower than with the single and triple fan results, clearly at that point you are starting to push the limits of what one plug is capable of, that could be from our motherboard or from the daisy chained design, either way, it is something to keep in mind. It wasn’t enough to affect performance in any significant way but going beyond 6 fans would be a concern.

Interestingly the 50% fan speed ended up being close to what the included controller would do on its lowest setting. This makes the medium setting which drops the RPM down to 2163 RPM a nice happy medium if you are looking for fast speeds but want to leave a little headroom to be able to bump things up on a hot day.