Cooler Master Masterfan SF120M

Introduction

With the SF120M, Cooler Master tried everything imaginable to create the strongest, fastest, most air pushing, and overall best build fan they could. 

A highly rigid Frame, a ring around the fan wings, solid specs, and a design so unique and "strong" looking that they may actually have produced the best fan imaginable. Let's find out!

What's in the Box

Getting hands-on with a Masterfan SF120M is already an experience on its own. The Packaging is nicely designed with an out-foldable front cover revealing every imaginable information about the fan including a sneak-peak window to witness what is about to happen.

Though packaging never really says anything about the product itself, the whole process already begins on a highly positive note.

By opening the front cover, we will have access to the provided spec sheet that we summarized down below.

Fan Speed limiter

One of the SF120M's most presented features is its Fan Speed Control.

This feature allows to limit the max fan speed of the SF120M in 3 Different Modes:

• Extreme Performance: 2000RPM
• Performance: 1600RPM
• Silence: 1200RPM

To switch between these different modes, there is a little dial located on one side of the fan Frame with a little "H - M - L" indication next to it.

Although we do not see this inclusion of such a system as anything negative, we also do not see the positive impact a feature like this would have. The SF120M being PWM controllable, it is an absolute ease to set any Fan speed the user wants to achieve via software. 

Installation

There are two ways to mount the fans provided by Cooler Master.

Included in the box, we will find the usual self-threading screws which we all know and hate, but they work.

Additionally to that, Cooler Master includes 4 special rubber strings. These can be shoved through the Fan Screw holes and your Cases Screw holes and let the Fans be held onto by sole rubber.

Although we highly appreciate the included and new attempt, we found these rubber strings to be highly unstable, letting the fans fall out, and overall be too thin to be actually used, forcing us to fall back to the hated fan screws.

Before mounting the fans, however, we need to hook them up.

Unfortunately for use, Cooler Master used a set of propriety ports on the SF120M's.

Included in the Box we will find a Proprietary-to-PWM adapter, allowing us to connect the fan's Proprietary port located on one of its sides, to a PWM power of the motherboard.

Although we are not big fans of any proprietary connection, we highly appreciate that Cooler Master includes a 1-3 splitter for their proprietary port in the box of every SF120M. These much longer cables allowed us to daisy chain 3 SF120Ms to a single port, making the cable mess a lot easier to manage.

Appearance

If there is one word to summarize the SF120M's look, it's Strong.

No fancy RGB, no cheap materials, nothing even close to "thin".

Everything about this fan is made to last.

With Aluminum enhancers around the Frame, an all-black Wing design, and little Matt-black engravings on the Wings, the SF120M delivers an outstandingly "strong" feeling.

The center of the fan is by far the most unique design aspect. Instead of gluing a sticker on it, Cooler Master decided to cut out their logo in the fan Wing, making the metal underneath it visible. An approach that we have not seen before.

All of this combined with a minimalistic approach makes it the perfect contender for almost any project.

Benchmark

Of course, we needed to benchmark this monster of a Fan.

By using our usual Benchmark setup, we let the SF120M spin at 100% Fan speed.

In this stage, the SF120M managed to keep the 3700x at 47°C, placing the Fan in the upper 10% of all of our previously tested fans.

Interestingly, however, the SF120M was not able to outperform Cooler Master's own Sickleflow 120 ARGB Fans.

But this changes drastically once the results are noise-normalized.

Here we can see that the SF120M's are able to perform at such a low noise level that almost none of our other fans are able to compete.

While outperforming every fan that we compared it to, the only Fan that is able to beat the SF120M is Noctua's best-in-class NF-A12x25. A truly outstanding result.

Conclusion

No matter how we look at it, Cooler Master managed to create an outstanding Fan.

The SF120M can score various points:

• Great Quality
• Great Noise-to-Performance Ratio
• Very good Performance
• Best in class robustness
• Interesting installation Approach
• Included Goodies

And the list goes on and on.

Adding to that, the SF120M comes in a very specific, yet nowadays quite rare design. Instead of relying on various RGB or otherwise highly noticeable optical features, Cooler Master solely relies on strength and the thereby created design.

With Brushed-Aluminum styled frame enhancers, an all-black Wing design, and a Cooler Master Logo cutout in the center, the Fan looks just strong. And its performance can hold up to the expectations set up by that look.

Ignoring the Fan Speed limiter that we already deemed unnecessary in our opinion, we can even ignore the proprietary ports due to all of the positive aspects of this fan.

For all of these positive aspects, we can only recommend the Cooler Master SF120M.