Closer Examination

The Scythe Kaze Flex 120 RGB PWM fan, as with just about every RGB fan today, uses a black frame and a translucent plastic rotor to allow the light to shine through. The biggest difference here, however, is the direction of the rotor itself, with the blades facing the other way than usually. A few companies, including EVGA, have tried a similar approach, but there the rotor still spins counterclockwise as seen from the front. With the Scythe Kaze Flex, the blades spin clockwise instead. It does not really change anything practically, though you may want to be aware of it if you are the type to whirl a fan rotor manually out of boredom. This is a square frame 120 x 120 x 25 mm fan with integrated corner rubber pads to add vibration dampening to and from the case, which is always nice to see. The corners are open in design, and should you want to change them to a different color, the rubber pads are removable. Otherwise, the black and translucent white color scheme will go well with most PC builds today.


The Scythe logo makes an appearance on both the front and back of the fan hub in the center, and we see the use of eleven curved blades and four curved stator vanes on the back. This design hints towards an airflow-optimized or hybrid airflow + static pressure optimized solution, so time will tell how it fares as a radiator fan for watercooling. Scythe makes no qualms about mentioning the fan was made in China, but I do find the 0.13 A rating potentially confusing since that is only for the fan motor (and how it is reported), as the eight RGB LEDs distributed around the fan hub are rated for an addition 0.4 A of power. In operation, the fan motor consumed a maximum current draw of 0.09 A (~1.1 W), so you should be able to power multiple fans off a single 1 A fan header on your motherboard. The LEDs are powered separately, of course. Note also that Scythe is using a good quality, sealed FDB (fluid dynamic bearings), with no bearing or motor noise for any of the provided test samples throughout the course of testing, which easily took multiple weeks. The solder quality of the two fan cable leads is good as well, so I have no complaints on the build quality at all.


As we saw before, there are two cables here, one for the fan motor and another for the RGB LEDs. The former is fairly long at ~50 cm, heatshrink sleeved in black, and terminates in a typical 4-pin fan connector which also happens to be black. The second cable is slightly shorter and terminates in a male 4-pin 12 VDC RGB connector while also having a daisy-chained female 4-pin header to use with more of the same fan if they are installed close to each other, say on a radiator or just as case fans for ventilation.


The eight RGB LEDs provide for a bright light show with light emanating from the center outwards. They light up the hub too, which makes for a better look at the 4-pole copper coiled motor in play here, and the degree of control over the LEDs depends on your specific controller. Scythe confirms these fans are compatible with the standard motherboard control options, including ASUS Aura Sync, ASRock RGB LED, MSI Mystic Light, and Gigabyte RGB Fusion. For what it is worth, white is fairly true to color here, and the fan is able to display different shades of color well enough. Above is also a video of some of the available color options.