I came real close to awarding be quiet! an Editor's Choice award for the Silent Wings Pro 4 120 mm fans. After all, there is little to complain about when it comes to the actual product. It's a good update to an already successful fan that still hangs in there today, so be quiet! had their work cut out for them to find avenues for improvement. The company could have gone the LCP composition route akin to the likes of Phanteks and Tt or even gone thicker to simply get physics on its side. Instead, the Silent Wings 4 lineup has multiple tiny changes that all add up positively. We have a clean black-on-black aesthetic with no RGB LEDs to be seen for those who couldn't care less about it. But then we have a few unnecessary—in my opinion anyway—accessories to make for a feature that I will never make use of. I also can't help thinking whether those tiny gaps between the replacement corners and the fan frame would hurt performance ever so slightly. We are at a point where there is little to distinguish this fan from other top contenders for your money when it comes to the performance-to-noise ratio as it is.

The Silent Wings Pro 4 gets all the basics executed to near perfection. There is a noise-less fluid dynamic bearing which will work fine in any orientation and promises longevity, to where you will be more likely to get bored and buy new fans in a few years, rather than needing to replace a failed unit. The five-years of warranty also go a long way to persuade customers to go with be quiet!, as will the part where the fan motors are more efficient than usual, consuming less power. The standard 25 mm thickness also means you can use radiator screws as-is and also not worry about whether these will fit inside your case. Having a single cable per fan also keeps cable management tidy, although I would have liked to see some form of daisy-chaining system included similar to some of the competition. This would have been all the more obvious had there been multi-pack SKUs, but instead we have to shell out a tear-jerking $31 per fan. It's purely for this higher cost that I can't get myself to give the Silent Wings Pro 4 our top award, but I have zero problems with recommending it for DIY watercooling.