Closer Examination

To no surprise, the EK-Quantum Impulse 120 D-RGB is a standard 120 mm square frame fan that is 26 mm thick. This makes it almost guaranteed to fit inside every PC case intended to use 120 mm fans for airflow and cooling. It comes in a black frame color option at this time although I imagine there may well be a white frame version to match the other white components sold under the EK banner. In addition to the expected frosted white finish to the rotor to better diffuse light from the centrally-placed RGB LEDs, there are also similar frosted white sections on either side of the frame. There are a total of three lighting zones here thus to allow for a more vivid light show off all the LEDs implemented here. The rotor has nine sharp blades with plenty of space in between and the blades are on the shorter side of average too owing to the physical constraints here with space taken up to accommodate the lighting system. No surprise then that these aren't intended to be high-performance radiator fans. Branding comes in the form of an EK logo on the front silver hub sticker and note also the rubber dampening pads on the open corners. These jut outward to make for a total of 29 mm thickness when not installed, although they do compress down in use from the screws to where it will be a non-issue from a thickness perspective.



From the back we see a fairly standard 4-way stator vane configuration employing a typical straight design. The same silver branded sticker is present here too as is another set of the diffuser plastic on the frame on the back. The EK-Quantum Impulse fans use the excellent Sunon VAPO magnetic levitation bearing we've seen before in a couple of other fans. It's a high efficiency silent bearing with a rated MTBF of 70,000 hours and is completely sealed with added dust resistance to where there should not be any change in the bearing performance and noise over time. This also means you should always run this fan over a 12 V PWM signal and not use voltage control as the bearing may not lift up at lower voltages. Aiding with this is the attached cable we saw before which comes off the side of the fan and has a daisy-chained micro-fit 8-pin male connector almost immediately past the frame. This cable is ~10 cm long and has a female micro-fit 8-pin connector on the other end.


The daisy-chaining is more easily understood with the three fans connected together. You would first orient them so that the cables are all facing the same way at the top or bottom of the stack. Then install the fans in your case and/or radiator and position the shorter cables such that the female micro-fit connector from the left-most fan can easily be paired with the male connector on the next fan, and continue until you are done. Ideally aim to have 3-4 fans on the same stack with the furthest fan, or one nearest to your motherboard anyway, now connected to the extension cable provided that then leads you to the standard 4-pin PWM and 3-pin LED connectors. This makes for a neater looking set of fans when installed together with only a single cable to manage rather than multiple, unnecessarily long cables. It's not as clean as what we've seen from the likes of Lian Li, for example, but is still an improvement from the norm.


Seen above are all three fans powered on and lit up so you get a better idea of what to expect from the LEDs on board. The translucent rotor helps diffuse the light quite well from the six LEDs centrally placed on each fan and then there are 12 more LEDs on each side of the frame. At lower brightness levels you can still see the individual LEDs although the fans do feel more uniformly lit up with the blades rotating and the LEDs at max brightness. Given the LEDs are powered and controlled off any standard 5 V D-RGB header, you can expect to also coordinate the lighting with other such compatible items in your PC such as LED strips and any integrated lighting on the motherboard, CPU cooler, GPU block etc. EK does not provide a separate LED controller and/or hub to go with these fans, and there is no first-party software to cover either.