ARCTIC P12 PWM PST A-RGB 120 mm Fan Review

Introduction

ARCTIC, previously known as Arctic Cooling, has been around for nearly 25 years now with physical offices in North America, Europe, and Asia and a vast retail network spread across more than 65 countries. The company is known for good quality products offering high value to end users, and our recent review of the P12 PWM PST 120 mm fan showed exactly why so many people had been requesting me to cover said fan for a while now. Indeed, while it isn’t the best performer or even the quietest fan, the P12 PWM PST performs well enough to where it’s become a default recommendation for many who are on a budget. It’s not a perfect fan though, as I noted how the fan noise itself is slightly more biased towards the higher frequencies. This increased pitch is less desirable from a system fan, and you will note how some of the readers mentioned that the P12 Max, as well as the subject of today’s review, aims to get around this issue with a slightly different rotor design.

Today we put the ARCTIC P12 PWM PST A-RGB to the test. The product name may be long, yet everything about it makes perfect sense when you read it all out. This is basically the RGB version of the popular P12 PWM, which happens to use individually addressable LEDs and also comes with ARCTIC’s PST (PWM sharing technology) feature, offering RPM readout and control passthrough if you want to daisy-chain fans together on a radiator. Given also how so many people today choose PC components with lighting and color matching in mind, there will no doubt be many who would be interested in this review. As with the non-RGB version, this fan is available in different base colors before the RGB customization comes into play. ARCTIC again makes my job harder by using the P12 name for a variety of different fans, and there even happens to be a different product called P12 PWM PST RGB which comes in only black and does not offer individually addressable LEDs. The two versions seem to share a common motor, bearing, and even RPM range of control. So this review may well be representative of the older RGB fan too, which may be of note to those who wish to save a few bucks this way. Let’s thank ARCTIC for providing review samples to TechPowerUp and begin with a look at the product specifications in the table below.

Specifications