be quiet! Light Wing 140mm Review

INTRODUCTION

The 120mm Light Wings Lineup was pretty much a Success while the 140mm High-Speed set was not quite able to keep up due to their noise-to-performance ratio. Let's find out if the regular 140mm Lineup can turn this around and create a good performing 140mm Light Wing!

WHAT'S IN THE BOX?

Included in a box of be quiet! Light Wings 140mm, we will find the expected 3x fans, but also some quite exciting goodies.

Ignoring the boring 3x sets of screws and some informational pieces of paper, there will also be an RGB Hub included in the box.

Powered by SATA Power and a 3-pin ARGB Hub, we can use this RGB HUB to spread the signal coming from your motherboard to 6 additional ARGB devices. Please note the repeatedly used word "Hub" instead of controller. As the difference might not be immediately apparent from the box's design, this little RGB container does not "create" any sort of light show. Instead, it ONLY copies an existing light show onto 6x additional ARGB ports, meaning that without an ARGB port on your motherboard or some off-brand controller, there will still be no shining lights.

INSTALLATION

Installing a be quiet! Light Wing 140mm is nothing out of the usual. Once the fan is positioned where you want it to stay, screw it in using the provided screws. To get the fan to spin we can use the 4-pin PWM connection and hook it up to the motherboard while the 3-pin ARGB connection does the same just on a different port. To make our lives a little bit easier, be quiet! added an ARGB splitter to the end of each Light Wing's ARGB header. This way we are even able to -not- use the included ARGB Hub and instead just daysi-chain every Light Wing fan that we would like to install to a single header on our motherboard, a cleaner, and simpler solution.

APPEARANCE

In contrast to the 140mm High-Speed counterpart, the slower spinning 140mm ar comes with a 7-Wing design. Almost indistinguishable from a Silent Wings design, these slightly bend but therefore significantly thicker wings are particularly good at pushing a huge amount of air at the cost of some static pressure. That being said, with 1.49mm/H20, these regular 140mm Light Wings are still on the upper end of the 140mm Case Fan spectrum. 

But before we end this section, we are legally required to add some words about the RGB. Similarly to every other Light Wing, the 140mm Version did not fail to deliver the same level of a high-quality light show. With an Milky-Acrylic Ring around the fans, the 20 LED's in there managed to win us over again. Additionally, (and similarly to every time before) we have 4 rounded cutouts in a ring around the fan in the back making sure that the fans look good even from the back.

BENCHMARK

While letting the Light Wings 140mm High Speed cool down our 3700x, they managed to keep the CPU at 50°C, 6°C in front of their 120mm Case Fan counterpart and 6°C behind their High-Speed Heatsink/Radiator focused version.

On the Noise-to-Performance end, however, the regular 140mm Light Wings did manage to score some significant points. While they may not be the very best with a 50°C peak performance point, they did in fact manage to beat every other Light Wing in terms of Noise-to-Performance until this very point.

CONCLUSION

Very much to our surprise, the 140mm 1500RPM version of the Light Wings managed to win us over again for be quiet!'s RGB-infused 140mm lineup. While the High-Speed 140mm version landed behind every other Light Wing version in our benchmarks, the 1500RPM Airflow Focused blades scored the best spot for noise-to-performance and simultaneously managed to outperform many other 140 & 120mm fans.

Due to this excellent noise-to-performance ratio, we believe that this 140mm Light Wing version is the best when it comes to a Case-Fan use case.

Thanks to this excellent performance paired with their outstanding quality and nice-looking RGB implementation, we can only recommend this fan for Airflow-focused use cases. For anything that goes beyond this, such as radiator usage, we would however recommend heading for the 120mm High-Speed version.