Closer Examination

Look straight at the Alphacool Apex Stealth and it will be as expected—a standard 120 mm fan which is 25 mm. Then you pick it up and suddenly you will realize this is heavier than usual at ~320 g. Depending on which finish you go for, perhaps your eyes might also be distracted by the blingy gold or chrome on the frame too. Then there's the part where the frame seems to be not a single piece either. Indeed, the Apex Stealth is being marketed as a metal fan because of the nature of its composition. There are two thick die-cast zinc sheets which are assembled on either side of the plastic rotor. There's a special decoupling mechanism employed such that the rotor, bearing, and motor will never feel vibrations from the case and this is a unique patent-pending innovation by Alphacool as the brand claims. Note also the design of the rotor with a closed outer lip all around making this still a fully closed fan without leakage from the sides. Likewise, the frame is curved to be thicker on the corner than in the middle. The corners are closed and those are also the attachment points for the frame. The fan screw holes are slightly inset into the corners which is why Alphacool provides separate screws as seen on the previous page. This matte black finish version is extremely clean looking from the front without even a brand logo on the front hub and the rotor has nine highly curved blades with an aggressive leading edge.


From the back we see a fairly novel 5-way curved stator vane configuration and I am curious how this will affect performance compared to the more typical 4-way straight stator vanes. The sticker on the back—angled for whatever reason—has the expected certification labels as well as clarification that this is the "Power" version of the Apex Stealth and is rated to spin up to 3000 RPM (+/- 10%). It is also rated to consume a maximum of 0.5 A off the 12 VDC rail, including start-up boost, which translates to a max power draw of 6 W per fan. In practice I observed the Apex Stealth to be taking up closer to half as much at full speed and the standard 2000 RPM version will draw even less to where you can get away with having three fans off a single 1 A fan header provided it can handle boost draw. There are also plenty of motherboards with 2 A fan headers these days, let alone aftermarket fan controllers that are powered directly from the PSU. Driving the fan is a 6-pole motor with a hydrodynamic bearing that should offer a good balance of operating noise and longevity irrespective of fan orientation. A ribbon-style cable comes out of the fan hub on the back with four individually sleeved wires in black. These go to a 4-pin male PWM connector that barely juts out the corner with a short daisy-chained cable going to the adjacent corner with a female 4-pin connector as seen above.


The daisy-chaining is more easily understood with the two provided fans connected together. You would first orient them so that the male connector from one fan is nearest the female connector of the adjacent fan. There is some slack in the cables to allow you to pull them out further to help connect the fans together before you can slide them in for a clean, near-invisible fan-to-fan connection. You can even tuck away the unused connector at the end of the stack with the other end now connected to your fan header via the provided 50 cm long extension cable. The end result is a single ribbon-style cable which is easy to hide behind the motherboard tray and you don't need any adapters given the use of a standard 4-pin PWM connector.