I have been waiting for a long, long time to say this—Corsair has once again put out an excellent watercooling fan. I miss the simpler days when basically every fan in the consumer space was 25 mm thick and RGB lighting was restricted to four LEDs in the hub, we saw a lot of cool rotor and bearing designs at the time. The Corsair ML120, for example, was a top recommendation from yours truly back then. But things have changed to the point where a lot of people prioritize aesthetics and the ability to coordinate lighting in their PC build, which is fair enough given CPUs and GPUs don't have as much room for improvement with thermals as before. With R&D money mostly going down the RGB route, thermal engineers and cooling product managers have also realized the simplest solution towards eking out more fan performance is simply to make the fan thicker to allow for larger fan blades pushing more air. LCP-based rotors also help stretch the blades further in the other two dimensions, thus allowing for that extra bit of air velocity leaving the fan. The Corsair RS120 MAX uses both of these techniques, but in combination with its AirGuide stator vane design and the new magnetic dome bearings to put out a compelling solution that hangs in very well with the very best from other brands today.

The problem is that the three other fans I directly compared the Corsair RS120 MAX to in the previous page all cost less. The Thermaltake TOUGHFAN 12 PRO is $25, the Lian Li UNIFAN P28 is $26, and the Phanteks T30-120 is $30. You could argue that the RS120 MAX offers cleaner aesthetics, especially if you don't like how the gray LCP rotors look, and it even comes with screws out of the box to save you time and money if you were going to use these on a radiator (which you should). But the others have things up their individual sleeves too—the TOUGHFAN 12 Pro is the standard 25 mm thick to aid in case compatibility, Lian Li offers the UNIFAN P28 with an optional RGB kit, white color option, and clean daisy-chaining, and the Phanteks T30-120 has three RPM modes to choose from on the back. While I can't speak for everyone, I do think that Corsair has a larger retail channel and possibly also higher brand power/loyalty, so this should help to an extent. From a pure performance and performance/noise basis, there's really not much to distinguish between these excellent performers. So I will give Corsair a conditional recommendation, but note that it comes with the expensive tag associated.