You’ve already seen the tests of the Endorfy Corona 120 fans, and now we’re adding results for the “reverse” variants. The aerodynamic design is essentially the same—just… reversed. The emphasis on visual appeal is therefore even stronger. The colorful lighting is complemented by an element intended to make the result even more striking. You won’t see the stator struts interfering with the appearance.
The defining feature of the Endorfy Corona 120 (Reverse) fans is the ARGB LED ring‑shaped light guide placed next to the impeller. The impeller itself is made of black material and is barely visible in the dark—also due to the relatively low brightness typical of this lighting style. The illumination is intense at specific points, but covers a smaller area compared to fans with light‑conducting impellers. What one prefers is, of course, subjective.
ARGB lighting is connected traditionally via a 3‑pin “digital” connector, and effects, colors, and brightness can be controlled through the motherboard’s software. The motherboard detects the connected ARGB device and allows configuration changes. The fans do not have their own dedicated application—likely because it would be redundant, and more importantly, using the motherboard software allows synchronization with other illuminated components in the system.
The aerodynamic design of the fan is efficient, but due to the relatively small impeller diameter (around ten centimeters, which is below average for 120 mm fans), we expect these fans to rank relatively low in airflow charts. This mirrors the behavior of the Endorfy Corona 120 models. They share the same impeller shape, but the impeller here is slightly different, and more importantly, the stator struts are positioned on the intake side. This can affect noise levels, and therefore the speed required to reach the same noise output differs. Incidentally, the maximum speed ends at approximately 1674 RPM.
The minimum PWM speed is extremely low, around 118 RPM. Even at higher speeds, the fans achieve exceptionally low vibration levels, which naturally stems from the shorter blade design. The shorter the blades, the less flexible they are—a good foundation for achieving low vibration.
Concerns about secondary noise caused by vibration transfer from the frame to the case (or any other component in contact with the fan) are therefore minimal, even though there are no anti‑vibration pads in the corners. Naturally, this does not automatically mean that vibrations cannot arise from airflow. They can. But in such cases, the pattern being flowed around must also be considered. One pattern may be noisier (and push the cooling system into stronger resonant frequencies), while another may not.
The above considerations are not so much about the fan itself, but about its interaction with a specific obstacle—and there are quite a few of those in real‑world use. It’s not just the pattern; the distance between the fan and the obstacle also shapes the result. These are topics that probably make more sense to analyze separately elsewhere. They don’t fit well into a standard fan analysis, since they are not purely fan characteristics (but characteristics of the fan combined with something else, which Endorfy understandably did not optimize the Corona 120 Reverse for). Its behavior inside the Aquarius 8000 Corona case—which we will examine later in testing—will be particularly interesting.
Please note : The article continues in the following chapters.
Spectrograms of „45 dBA“ without obstacles:
The reverse model is already “acting up” here too (on some obstacles, those tonal peaks are even higher), but the standard variant, in exchange, has more noise distributed across other sound frequencies. 🙂