Closer Examination

Given the Thermaltake SWAFAN 12 RGB shipped as a triple pack, I had to take a group photo after all! I appreciate the monochrome aesthetics when the fan isn't lit up, including with the same style of rotor as used with the replacements we saw on the previous page. The difference being that of course this is the conventional format (fan blade 1, as Tt refers to it) allowing for air to be pushed through the front and out the back of the back itself. There are arrows on the frame indicating this, which is hilarious to me on a fan with deliberately removable fan blades that make said arrow redundant. Regardless, this is a 120 x 120 x 25 mm fan with a rounded frame to accommodate the white diffused plastic rings on either side for more uniform lighting. There is another ring around the hub itself where we see a black sticker to help distinguish it compared to the other one with the white sticker. Fan corners are semi-open in that you can still place screws through them and access through the gap in the middle, and there are vibration-dampening silicone pads on the corners.


At this point I simply had to take the rotor off to see how the swappable fan blades work, and it's as simple as pushing the installed ones from the back via uniform force applied at 2-3 points. It doesn't take much effort but not once did I feel it was loose. Comparing the two fan blades confirms a simple engineering employed with the same rotor design just flipped around the central hub. There are nine blades in each rotor with an angled leading edge akin to hybrid design fans today that aim to balance out on static pressure and max airflow. I can see already that these won't compete against the highly static pressure-optimized radiator fans, but time will tell exactly how the Tt SWAFAN 12 RGB stacks up. Inserting the blades is even simpler in that the rotor balancing shaft acts also as an alignment point and then you just push inward in the middle until it clicks in place. Note that the direction of the blades rotating does not change with the new blades, just that the rotor design itself ends up making it a fan in a "pull" configuration. It also faces extra airflow restriction now from the stator vanes which now also don't help with airflow directionality either. So there are a couple of tradeoffs in this configuration you need to be aware of and it will certainly affect cooling performance compared to the default setup.


With the fan blades removed, we get a rare view of the motor itself with Tt going the traditional 4-pole route here with copper winding. The SWAFAN 12 RGB uses a fluid dynamic bearing with the novel detachable design, and note also the pot that the shaft enters is where you would add the lube should you see it dried up after a few occasions of going back and forth between the two blade types. In practice no one in their right mind is going to change the rotor out more than 1-2 times, so this is a non-issue. The fan is rated for a max current draw of 70 mA off the 12 VDC rail for the motor and LEDs collectively, and this works out to a massive 8.4 W each. But given that the fans in operation will consume far less—Tt rates 3.24 W each—and there are two power sources for the motors and LEDs here, it's a non-issue. If anything, it's the 5 VDC rail on the motherboard for the LED header that will limit how many fans you can connect to a single channel more so than the fan motors themselves. There are 30 LEDs per fan here, and this is why Tt recommends going with no more than three SWAFAN 12 RGB units per header. I can certainly see dedicated LED controllers becoming popular with these fans thus! A single cable comes off each fan at the corner and gets placed inside an old-school rubber tubing-style sleeve with heatshrink on the sides. It will not win any aesthetics or functionality awards here, although it does take well to being folded and bunched up for easier cable routing.