Packaging and Closer Examination

The ARCTIC P12 PWM PST is not an expensive fan, and part of being able to sell this at a lower price means the packaging and accessories get as barebones as possible. Even so, we still see a full color banderole over the cardboard product box as opposed to bare cardboard as some have done. On the front of this relatively petite box is the brand logo and product name, a render of the fans—I do not know if the color is true to the fan color itself, and salient features. This continues on the back, with a QR code leading you to an online user manual rather than something printed in the box. Fan specs are seen below, and the box opens from the top or bottom allowing you to pull out the fan as well as a set of four self-tapping metal screws for installing in a case.


As per the ARCTIC website, the P12 PWM PST comes in three colors—black, white, and a white fan with transparent rotor. The non-PST version of the P12 PWM has an additional black with transparent rotor option too. I received two of the black version for this review, and these are undoubtedly the most popular version given all the photos I've seen of PC builds with these fans installed. The P12 PWM PST is a standard 120 x 120 x 25 mm fan, with a square frame design—at least where it counts—to prevent any air leak when up against a radiator or other flat object. A branded sticker is seen on the front hub, with the rotor using five highly curved blades and noticeable gaps between. This looks like a hybrid fan design to me, optimized for a balance of airflow and static pressure. The materials used aren't fancy, there is no next-gen engineering done to the frame or rotor, everything is basically decent here and that's fine too. Some aesthetic designs at the fan corners might distract you from the part where there are no vibration dampening rubber pads, with ARCTIC claiming "sinus magnetization" of the motor results in only up to 5% the vibrations compared to a conventional DC motor. Good thing they explain what this is and how they achieved it—oh wait, they do not. In practice, I did feel some vibrations at higher fan speeds, so this feels more like a cost-saving approach. The fan corners are open to allow easier installation on a radiator/heatsink/case, and there are no arrows to indicate the direction of blades rotating and airflow through the fan, just in case you needed them.


From the back we see a 4-way stator vane configuration leading from the hub, albeit these are again highly curved similar to the blades and not the usual straight configuration we see on PC fans. There's no sticker on the back of the hub, although relevant info is etched in place. We find out here that the P12 PWM PST uses a highly efficient motor, taking up only a max of 0.1 A (1.2 W on the 12 VDC rail). This includes start-up boost, and thus you will be fine having plenty of fans connected together and powered/controlled off the same standard 1 A fan header. These fans use a fluid-dynamic bearing, which is nice for longevity and performance, and ARCTIC feels confident enough to provide a six-year warranty to back this. This is especially true when you see the fans are rated for up to 40 °C operating temps, which is a lot for a cheap fan bearing.


We see a 4-wire flat cable headed from the back hub to the frame, which continues to a 40 cm long cable that has a daisy-chain female connector associated with the standard male 4-pin PWM connector. This allows, in theory, for you to connect multiple of these P12 PWM PST fans together cleanly. The way you do it is not elegant though, as you have to wrap the cable around the fan frame—these fans ship as much—and then connect the fans together as seen above. Doing so can be clean looking, yet now you have don't have any cable length left to go from the leading fan to the fan header! The other way round is to just unwrap the cables, making for a weird looking mess and still not as long as you might think. I suspect most people might have to get a PWM extension cable or a standalone fan hub, and conveniently ARCTIC happens to sell one. There's also a PWM sharing cable accessory which looks far better to me, so I'd personally just get the non-PST model and this cable instead, which can work out to be the same cost depending on how many fans you get.