Gelid Gale Extreme Review

Introduction

If you are looking for the most insane, most extreme, most powerful fan, this may be the perfect candidate for you! Spinning at 6000RPM, there is little that this fan cannot do! Let's take a closer look at this behemoth!

What's in the Box?

Gelid's Gale Extreme 120mm Fan comes inside a relatively thick box. Apart from the usual amount of imagery, we will also find a short spec sheet.

Once the box is opened up and everything unboxed, we will find the following items:

• Gelid Gale Extreme
• 1x Set of Fan Screws

Down below we summarized the spec sheet:

Installation

Installing a Gelid Gale Extreme will or not will be the usual Case fan experience. The difference occurs because of the Fan grill found in the front.

This grill is mounted to the fan using regular fan screws. Therefore, if we were to install the fan with the screws being attached from the front, we are first forced to unscrew the grill and remove it. In case you would like to keep using the grill, be it from the back or in front of the bracket that the fan will be mounted to, we still have the possibility, just make sure to squeeze it in between the fan and screws.

Once the fan is installed using the 4 included screws, we can connect the fan using its 50cm long PWM cable.

However, do not blindly connect it to one of your motherboard headers! Beware, pulling above 2A total power at max speed, your motherboard will most probably not be capable of running even a single on of these fans, at least none of ours were.

For our benchmarks, we were forced to use one of Arctic's Fan controllers to make all the fans spin at their full RPM range.

In case you don't want to include internal fan controllers to connect the fans, you might want to consider Sata/Molex to 4/3 pin Fan adapters. Although they would make the fan spin at full speed, it is definitely the better option compared to what the Motherboard header would do.

Appearance

Generally speaking, the Gelid Gale Extreme is a brick.

Being 38mm thick compared to the usual 25mm, the Gale Extreme ended up as a much thicker boy than we initially expected.

The impressive look created by the immense thickness is still not everything. Added to that we have the fan grill protecting your fingers from accidentally entering the fan.

All of these things make the fan look and feel incredibly strong and indestructible

Other than that, the fan is designed as simply as possible. An all Black frame with black wings. No rubber around the fan holes, no exceptional optical features, just raw performance.

Hidden behind the fan grill we will find 7 slightly bent but incredibly thick wings with one of the biggest central fan hubs we have ever seen.

Benchmark

We tested the 38mm thick Gelid Gale Extreme 120mm fan spinning at max 6000RPM in our usual hybrid Case-almost-Heatsink benchmark machine.

Allowing the fan to spin at speeds fast enough to move the case, the Gale Extreme was able to keep the CPU at 32.1°C above ambient, the absolute best 120mm fan result we have seen so far. The only contestant capable of beating this is an array of 21x 15k RPM Arctic mini 40mm fans.

On the noise to performance front, the fan performed exactly as we expected, however, it had a little twist.

Being the loudest fan we have seen so far, it is the only fan that managed to maximize our benchmark setup to this point.

However, the noise-to-performance ratio was not bad at all! Once the speed was pushed back to Noctua NF-A14 Industrial levels, their noise-to-performance ratio align. Something we have absolutely not expected considering how much Noctua invests in optimizations and how much a Gale Extreme costs.

Conclusion

Although the Gale Extreme now counts as "the best" 120mm fan we have ever tested as far as max performance is concerned, it should not be used by regular people.

Looking at it in all honesty, it is either a Fan meant for high-performance server usage, or for mining rigs.

Any other use case would create a noise loud enough to be hearable through multiple closed doors, rendering it completely useless in any sort of everyday use.

However, keeping this in mind, we still believe it to be astonishing how it performed. Not only was the Gale Extreme capable of maxing out our benchmark machine, but at the same time it ended up with the same noise-to-performance ratio as Noctua's NF-A14 Industrial, a fan we have praised a lot.

Considering everything said above, if you are about to build a Server-like PC and you do not need to care about how loud the PC truly is, then the Gale Extreme seems like the perfect candidate. Best-in-Class max performance, and one of the best noise-to-performance ratios for fans spinning at crazy high speeds. Additionally, at 25€ the price is actually quite affordable compared to similarly quick alternatives.

But as far as "regular" pc fans are concerned, there are a lot better noise-to-performance ratios available.