Alphacool Rise Aurora 120 mm ARGB fan – a tangible surprise with extremely high throughput and acoustic restraint

With street prices starting at around 16 euros, Alphacool is positioning the brand new Rise Aurora 120 mm as a mid-range fan for housings and, above all, radiators. Without wanting to spoil it in advance: the fan was a real and above all a positive surprise, because it was not only worlds better in the test than the direct predecessor model, but it was also able to offer the reference fan in many ways more than just stand up to it. That is of course a lot of advance praise, but it can be justified by the test results.

Alphacool has done nothing and uses one of the well-known manufacturers for the fan instead of a rather cheap low-budget fan. With Power Logic, an experienced manufacturer has been chosen who also supplies other suppliers with suitable products. In the end, of course, as always, you get what you pay for and not a gram more. Which brings us to the weight, which is quite decent at 180 grams, but also relies on a decent drive. We’ll have something else about that in a moment.

Yes, the part is brightly colored and ARGB seems to be the very first civic duty at the moment anyway – so here at Alphacool they have appropriately offered themselves to the market. What I like about it is the fact that both the translucent hub shines and a thin outer ring. Despite this whole lighting implementation, the diameter of the rotor blades does not really suffer, so that the fan not only lights up, but also delivers properly.

The fans can be cascaded with the ARGB, but Alphacool does not include an adapter for the Preci-Dip connection on the motherboard (5 volts). Of course, other Alphacool products such as Eisball, Eisbär, Eiswolf & Co already come with an adapter and you can simply clip in the fans, but if you want to use this fan outside of the Alphacool universe, you have to add an adapter in the Alphacool shop. With 5 euros you are already good at it, but the purchase price of the fans is rather fair.

In order to achieve this, Alphacool relies on somewhat cheaper slide bearings, which, due to the design, only has a negative effect on the service life if the fan is directly exposed to the heat. The maximum of 40 ° C on a radiator is certainly not one of them, even when used as a case fan there is no alarm to fear. Better a clever sliding bearing than a rumbling double ball bearing or a very inexpensive cheap FDB bearing, whereby sliding bearings are characterized by a more restrained background noise, especially at lower speeds. So you can’t have everything.

On the next page you can see how and what we test and why. Understanding the details is extremely important in order to be able to classify the results objectively later. The differences between many models are more in the details and the best fan for all situations can hardly exist. There is a certain optimum in every situation and, of course, good all-rounders. But they usually have their price. If you are planning specifically with 60 mm radiators, for example, you can perhaps save money by choosing the best model for your application, which might not do so well as a case fan. And vise versa, of course.

For your curiosity, I also have the original data sheet at hand as a PDF:

DE_1020781_Alphacool_Rise_120mm_Luefter_Datenblatt

Since the fan is not yet listed in Geizhals, I have included the shop link as an exception:

Aurora Rise 120 mm RGB im Alphacool-Shop