Amid all the new releases from CORSAIR, these SP RGB ELITE fans may be a lower priority even for their own marketing department. As such, these can easily be overlooked by many unless you eagerly want to get add-on fans to go with the stock fans in recent CORSAIR RGB cases. As is tradition now, we get a full series of fans available for purchase in single and multi-packs, as well as in 120 and 140 mm sizes. It would be easy to dismiss these as another in the long line of CORSAIR SP fans that have come up over the years, including the SP RGB PRO fans that are very similar at first glance. However, I dare say that this is THE CORSAIR fan to get over any other if not watercooling the PC.

Sure, the QL and LL fans are incredible to look at. They have a lot more LEDs per fan and more consistent lighting owing to the LED loops in the center and at the edge. In contrast, the SP RGB ELITE fans "only" have 8 RGB LEDs per fan, located centrally, which in turn does mean the 140 mm version is not as well lit. As with a lot of other such fans today, each of these is individually addressable, and the 120 mm fan is near-perfect for this configuration in terms of size. But distinguishing the SP120 RGB ELITE from most others is iCUE, which in the latest iteration has been a big improvement in both the user experience and system resource utilization. The multi-packs also are the way to go for new builds, which now really means you might be better off getting the Airflow variant of the new CORSAIR cases and buying these separately, or even going with any other case of your own. In fact, I am personally going to use these fans for case airflow in my build, where these will do a really good job. I have static-pressure-optimized fans on copper radiators in a custom loop that cool the primary components anyway, so I need good, quiet fans that don't need to be the best-performancing, but provide direct airflow throughout a large case to keep the ambient temperature uniform. So that is an interesting use case for these fans I am not sure I would have thought of before testing them.

We get a long PWM duty cycle range for control here, with a linear RPM response curve that goes beyond CORSAIR's own marketed numbers, although your mileage may vary. As such, setting up a custom fan curve becomes all the easier considering most motherboards today offer PWM control via a manually set duty cycle percentage or through CPU temperature association, for example. The hydraulic bearing combined with the lower maximum RPM compared to most other options makes for a fairly quiet fan even at full throttle. As a radiator fan, you can do better no doubt, and I am sure even CORSAIR would agree given these are not even marketed as such. But in terms of performance-to-noise, it outperformed a lot of other tested fans, including some marketed for watercooling and others that dial the RGB factor to 11. So while my testing was not necessarily the best use case for these fans, they still manage to surprise to where I judge them positively, even more so as case fans.

There is another benefit a more restrictive radiator would have perhaps caught since the SVF design results in more uniform airflow through the whole fan diameter instead of just the outer ~20%–30% as with most other fans. As such, I have to acknowledge that my specific testing was even more limiting to these fans since it was done with a medium of airflow restriction the rotor design isn't optimized for, and the stator vanes didn't quite come into their own. Think of it like the reverse Goldilocks Principle, and keep it in mind when I say these fans, especially in their 120 mm iteration, are one of the better RGB fans out there currently. Now CORSAIR just needs to release the equivalent 8-LED ML fans so that I can stop complaining about the neglect for pure watercooling applications with the brand's fan base (pun intended).