Photos, Installation, and Performance

To start things off, the packging for the fans isn’t much bigger than the fns themselves. They have the HSF 100 branding on them as well as the XFX logo and then down in the bottom left corner they list the fans color. The photo on the front shows an LED fan lit up and it floating just above the video card. Obviously this is a rendering, the fans cant run when not plugged in, but it does show the hotswappability and the LED lighting in one image. The back of the box actually has photo instructions on how to install the fans right on it. This is literally simple enough that it can be summed up in four photos, similar to how to make some mac and cheese. Then from there, inside the box the fans sit in a formed plastic tray with not much for protection.

What is interesting to me is that the fans are actually semi transparent on the blades but still have the black ring around them. When I was first told about them I was just expecting black fans with lights, this setup should look a lot better with the lights running but I do have a feeling your card might look a little funny with its all black look with two white fans in the middle. Each fan has the XFX logo on the center section, just like the stock fans. Then on the back the back sticker has all of the certification stuff, the XFX logo, and if you look close they also put the LED color on it as well. This was big for me in my testing because I had six fans that all looked the same until hooked up.

Okay, so I said the installation is simple and frankly you shouldn’t even need the four photos for instructions on the box for this. The fans both have two clips on them, you grab the fan by the clips and it will pop right off the card. With them out you can see that there is a PC one side, so we just need to make sure that the PCB on the card and on the fans match up when reinstalling the new fans. There are only two ways to install the fan back in, so you have good odds even if you don’t bother to look. Just to test out how hard this would be for someone completely new to the fans, I tossed a fan to my wife and had her swap one out without any instruction and she had it done in less than 30 seconds.

Here is a look at the factor fans along side of the Hard Swap LED fans. Other than the semi transparent white blades you can’t tell the difference between them. They have the same blade layout, the same outer bracket, and they both have the XFX logo that looks like the original Xbox logo in the middle. The sticker in the middle for the LED fans does have a white background though.

So like I said before, the card with the fans installed looks a little odd. The white fans don’t exactly match up with the all black look. That said, this is about the only time you will see the fans not powered up, once powered up the white turns a different color. Except on the white LED fans of course.

So here is a shot of the new fans with white LEDs. With the LEDs on the white on black actually looks really good. This specific shot is with the fans spooled down to their low power mode so they weren’t spinning.

The red on black really complements the XFX card and should look really good with the countless red and black “gaming” motherboards on the market.

The blue looks good as well, though it is my least favorite of the three color configurations. When taking this photo with the flash and in high light you can really see how the light radiates out of the middle of the fan. With the small mounting ring around the fans XFX couldn’t go with the traditional way of installing LEDs into the fan, so they had to tuck them up inside the fan. This will most likely make swapping to other colors even more complicated should anyone want to do that.

From there I started messing around with mixing and matching colors. The red and blue and the red and white configurations looked really good to me. The white and blue would look good in an ice themed PC as well. Of course to run two colors you have to pick up to full sets.