Akasa Otto SC12 Review

Introduction

Akasa's Otto Line of products promises to be the absolute best for absolutely every use case. With their insane stats and water resistance, they seem to be the perfect fit for any industrial-grade application. Let's see how they can keep up as a normal consumer-grade Fan!

What's in the Box?

When getting an Akasa Otto SC12, you can expect the usual PC Fan box containing the Fans and some installation material. Instead of the usual installation material however, Akasa included a set of rubber nobs. These are meant to be used similarly to the screws, but instead of screwing, they can be pressed in and pulled on the other side to mount onto your case and fans.

Down below we also included a short spec sheet summary:

Installation

Installing an Akasa Otto SC12 is a process as easy as with any other fan. Position the Fan where you want it to be, slide the Rubber mounting pins through the fan screw holes and the case brackets, and pull on it until it clips into place. 

Appearance

Being mainly targeted at the industrial market, the SC12 is coming in an appropriate design. Black Frame and Grey-isch blades with a bunch of breathing holes for the fan motor in the center seem to be as industrial as it gets. 

The center of the fan also got a little gold accent in the form of the motor shaft protruding slightly into the wing material, making it slightly visible from the outside.

As different types of designs are not appealing to everybody, we do want to point out that the design seems to be well executed. No portion of the fan seems to be of lower quality, nor look outdated / faded or worn out. Overall as we are quite the fans of such implementations, we are happy with how the fan turned out.

Cleaning

One of the Otto-line's main features is that the Fans are 'easily' cleanable.

This comes in the form of a two-piece frame and fan implementation. Even while being installed, the SC12's Fan portion can be pulled out of the frame, making it easily cleanable.

Due to how the connection between both portions is implemented, there is a layer of rubber keeping both pieces together. Therefore, there is absolutely no need for any rubber around the screw holes as the rubber in between the different fan sections will absorb all of the vibrations.

As much as we liked this feature, we believe it requires some refinement. Due to the fan section only being removable to the back, this function becomes un-usable if the fan is installed in front of a bracket with the Fan facing away from the said bracket. In this case, the fan section should be pulled to the back, but the bracket is keeping you from doing so.

We believe it to be absolutely necessary to re-design this feature so that the main fan section can be removed in both directions.

WATER RESISTANCE

The most shocking feature of the SC12's is their Water resistance. 

Due to the IP68 rating, the SC12 should be able to survive every kind of Dust and Sand and be submerged into the water at least 1m deep for an hour without taking any damage.

In the video linked at the top of this page, we tested this feature extensively. As it turns out, the claimed IP68 rating seems to be true as the fans survived being submerged and continued to work later.

As fun as the experiment was, we do want to point out that this is a -good to have- not a -must-use- feature. 

We are not yet certain where this feature may come in handy, but for now on we're just happy to have water-resistant fans.

Benchmark

Even though the SC12's are clearly aimed at the Industrial market and solely meant for Heatsink and Radiator operations, we did use our standardized benchmark to be able to compare them with our other contestants. Please keep in mind that our Benchmark test is not solely Case/Airflow Focused, but creates a generalized number that consists of both, the Fan's ability to transport huge amounts of air as well as its static pressure.

While letting the Fans spin at 100% of their 2000RPM, the SC12's managed to keep the CPU at 45°C. This places them 2°C better than their Airflow-focused counterparts.

After Noise-Normalizing our results, we saw the huge downside that comes with industrial-grade fans. Noise. 
Although the SC12s did not perform badly on a raw temperature basis, their immense noise at max speeds makes it hard to use these as your usual fans.

Once the target temperature was lowered, however, the SC12 managed to quickly catch up to the other fans while even surpassing the T30's in their performance mode.

We also want to point out that it turned out that the SC12's have a minimum speed of 1100RPM. It is due to this that the SC12's seem to randomly stop at 67°C in our Noise Normalized Benchmark results, while all our other fans are slowly falling into thermal throttle.

Conclusion

The Akasa Otto SC12 is a very interesting set of fans.

With extraordinary features such as easy cleaning and being waterproof, they absolutely do establish themselves as industrial-grade fans. However, we are still unsure as to how much these two functions are actually useful in an everyday situation. The only real use-case for both of these functions that we could think of is by combining them into one. -Disassembling, then Cleaning in water.

That being said, as we are no industry, we needed to test the benchmark in our home/consumer setup. Here, the SC12 did manage to keep up with other fans in the lower speeds, but they completely topped the charts ( in a negative way ) as soon as they started to spin at max speed.

Overall, if having water-resistant and 'cleanable' fans is what you are looking for, then you found your contestant. But we need to stay realistic for the average home user. And truth is that non of this fan's 'extra' features will be useful in a normal situation. 

Therefore, due to the features being useless for the average consumer, we believe that the SC12 is no match for a home setup, but it will be a perfect match for any industry-like situation in which the Fan will be exposed to Dust, Sand, or even water.