Akasa Otto SF12 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 their airflow-focused industrial fans can keep up as a normal consumer-grade Fan!

What's in the Box?

When getting an Akasa Otto SF12, 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:

Something quite noteworthy about both sets of Akasa Otto Fans is their near-identical Specsheet. Although the SF12s are supposed to be "airflow focused" their static pressure is solely 0.25 mm/H2O underneath the SC12.

Installation

Installing an Akasa Otto SF12 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 SF12 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 No portion of the fan seems to be of lower quality, nor look outdated / faded or worn out.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 SF12'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 SF12's is their Water resistance. 

Due to the IP68 rating, the SF12 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 SF12's are clearly aimed at the Industrial market, we did use our standardized benchmark to be able to compare them with our other contestants. 

While letting the Fans spin at 100% of their 2000RPM, the SF12's managed to keep the CPU at 47°C. This places them 2°C behind the Static pressure-focused SC12.

Although the difference between Akasa's SF12 and SC12 wasn't that big until now, after noise normalizing our results, we were able to observe how severe the difference really is, with the SF12 losing along the complete spectrum.
While slowly lowering the fan speed we were able to notice that the SF12's minimum Fan speed is not 0 RPM as mentioned on their website, but it is actually 1100RPM. This paired with the horrific cooling capabilities at that speed, created a Fan that lets the CPU thermal throttle significantly faster than most other fans in that performance category.

Conclusion

Akasa's Otto line of high-performance fans is quite unique and interesting.

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, even though the SF12 managed to keep up with quite many of our other fans, it completely lost track in the lower speeds.

Therefore, we conclude this fan review in two different ways. The first one is that the whole Otto line should exclusively be used within an industrial application, as the product page (very poorly) states.

The second conclusion is that the SC12 fan is overall a better fan in terms of performance.
Therefore we would recommend to anybody who is looking for a fan with that level of 'exclusive' features, to take a look at the Otto SC12.