Lian Li Uni SL Infinity 140 Review

Introduction

After the surprising rise of Lian Lis Uni SL Infinity fans to the top of our benchmark list, now it's time for the 140mm counter part. Let's take a look if they perform just as good!

What's in the Box?

While Lian Li's smaller 120mm Uni SL fans could be purchased in a triple pack, the 140mm version solely exists in an individually packaged version.

One of these comes with the following items:

• Lian Li Uni SL Infinity 140 Fan
• Connector Proprietary - PWM+3Pin ARGB
• 1x Set of Screws

The box itself is designed very similarly to every other packaging in Lian Li's Fan lineup. A bit of imagery and some short specs.

Although not necessary, we can purchase the controller separately and use the same connectors from the 120mm versions to connect the fans to the controller. All customization options and possibilities will remain the same.

Down below we summarized the spec sheet:

Installation

Due to the fact that the 140mm Uni SL fans are coming in individual boxes with a Proprietary-to-standard connector included, there is really only a single installation mode available if the connector is not purchased separately.

Position the fan, screw it in, and use the included connector to adapt Lian Li's proprietary connector to standard PWM and 3-Pin ARGB.

One side of the fan houses the male version of Lian Li's 7-pin Fan connector while the other side houses the female version. This connector is responsible for everything that the fan is supposed to do, Light and Speed.

In order to use the fan, we are required to use this connector one way or the other in combination with the included cable.

To get it connected, we just need to position it on top of the connector on the fan side and slide it in.

While most fan's daisy-chaining feature comes in for daisy-chaining the cable, Lian Li's approach is vastly different.

By positioning the Male- port of a fan right next to the female port of a second fan, we can use the hooks that are present on the edges of a Uni SL fan to slide two fans into each other creating a 2x1 Fan cluster. 

This process can also be repeated up to 4x times creating a 560mm black of fans.

From there you can use your Motherboard's software to further control the lightning and speed of the fan.

However, although it is not a necessity, we strongly advise purchasing the fans with one of Lian Li's Fan controllers. Due to its grouping features, it creates significantly less cable clutter.

Appearance

Very similar to the smaller Uni SL fans, the bigger 140mm version comes with the exact same overload of RGB, just in big.

The front of the fans features an illuminated fan wing portion with an infinity mirror in the center. 
Around two sides of the front, we have two very thin lines or RGB.

The sides of the fan's frame even come with ARGB in form of additional ARGB Infinity mirrors.

But if that wasn't enough, the back side got another RGB ring, just in case.

Although we are not that deep into ARGB due to personal reasons, we do appreciate what Lian Li put together for their Uni SL series. The ARGB implementation is impeccable.

No LED's are visible to the naked eye, the transitions are as smooth as you would expect them to be, and there is no flickering of any sense.

But it's not only the ARGB dose, quality-wise in general there is also nothing to nag about on the 140mm Uni SL's. Being built like a brick, they seem indestructible and feel incredibly high-quality.

Benchmark

We benchmarked the Lian Li Uni SL Infinity 140 Fans on top of our usual Test-Benchmark.

While letting the fans spin at their max 1600RPM, they managed to keep the CPU at 44.9°C. This is a quite surprising result. 
Although they managed to get to the upper half of our list, it was quite surprising to see how far away they landed compared to the smaller 120s.

On the Noise-to-Performance graph, we were able to observe that this behavior continues through all the fans.

While we do realize that Lian Li's Uni SL 140s perform exceptionally well, they are not on the level of their 120s.

Overall, they were able to outperform be quiet!'s Silent Wings Pro 4 140 and Arctic's P14 without any hassle. But considering how exceptionally well the smaller version performed, it was still a surprise nonetheless.

Conclusion

Although we already knew what was waiting for us, Lian Li's fan lineup just stays incredibly interesting throughout a review.

Quality-wise, there is still nothing to nag about. The Fans are built exceptionally well, their ARGB implementation can be described as industry-leading, and the fans give you the confidence that they will never break down.

And even the connector ended up being something positive.

Although we are usually trying to stay away from proprietary connectors of any sort, Lian Li's approach is so efficient that we would even go as far as to say that we prefer using that to the non-proprietary cables.

We are even going one further, we believe it is so incredibly efficient that we are recommending getting the L3 Controller additionally to be able to control multiple Lian Li fans and fan clusters through their software.

Performance-wise, we were stunned, but not in a good way.

Although both Max-Performance as well as Noise-to-Performance ended up relatively good, the 140s did not manage to outperform the smaller 120s. Something that the spec sheets suggested otherwise.

But even if the 120s performed flat-out better, the 140s are still relatively strong performance, especially in their Noise-to-Performance ratio, which was only beaten by fans like the Noctua NF-A14.

All in all, we are still amazed by Lian Li's fan lineup, also in 140, and can therefore absolutely recommend them for your next Build.

However, we do want to point out (again), Uni SL Infinity 120mm are outperforming their bigger 140mm counterparts. But, assuming that they would be used as regular case fans, the difference will become very minimal, especially because, unlike their max performance, the noise-to-performance ratio of both size versions is not that far apart from each other.