Introduction

While I was working on this blog, I had the opportunity to test out a pre-production sample of the new EKWB Vardar series of fans, specifically the Vardar F4-120. Stren of Xtremerigs.net fame was kind enough to host the article there and EKWB thought it was good enough to be included in their press release. Now with the retail release of all 5 120mm models done, I wanted to see how the retail versions fared as well as host them on this website itself. So thanks to Derick and Niko from EKWB, as well as Hank from Performance PCs, we take a look today at the first of the 5 fans: the Vardar F1-120.

We begin as always by noting the specs from the product page:

So we see that the fan has a double ball bearing which I would have expected to last longer than the advertised MTBF of 50, 000 hours. No mention of warranty here, although I do know EK has a standard 2 year warranty on most of their products as mentioned here. The power draw rating is quite low, and suggests one can easily daisy chain a lot of these off a single PWM fan header- even a standard 1 A (12 W) motherboard header. We shall see soon how this sample fares in reality. Let’s take a look at the fan in detail on the next page.