NZXT wants to standardise unibody PC fans and that concerns me

It's a looker but a little short-sighted.

While every PC brand under the sun chases the utopia of daisy-chainable fans to reduce the wiring demands in your system, NZXT has a different idea. How about you cut out that process entirely? Debuting its unibody fans at Computex, the brand will soon offer duos and trios of 120mm and 140mm options that come as a pre-installed block.

It’s not an entirely new idea, as Hyte’s THICC P60 takes the same approach, but it is one of the first to market and something NZXT wants to become the new standard. Talking with PC Gamer, NZXT CEO Johnny Hou states he’d be “proud” to see the industry move to the new form factor and that it’d be “pushing the industry in the right direction” to give people “a better consumer experience.” The brand is storming ahead with the idea, as it’ll bundle them inside its PC cases.

Credit where it’s due, it’s easy to see why the company feels this is the right path. Surveys suggest it’s what people want, it’ll be far easier to install, and it inarguably looks the part with nary a screw in sight aside from the four holding it in place. The unibody approach also does away with the headache and added cost of manufacturers figuring out how to deliver power and control signals through magnets and other proprietary connectors.

My issue with the idea, and the reason I don’t want it to become the de facto, is repairability. As a physically moving part, fans are notoriously more at risk of failure than most other components in your PC. If just one bearing breaks, which is a real possibility that happened to me just last month, the whole unit is then defective. The same goes for the RGB lighting if an LED gives up the ghost.

Unlike your traditional method of swapping out the offending fan with a new one, you must throw out the entire set. NZXT says it’ll replace everything under warranty, however long that may be, but you’re on your own after that coverage runs out. You’ll incur the full expense of a replacement.

It also considerably adds to e-waste, which is a growing problem in the technology sector. If we’re lucky, the ones sent back under warranty are successfully repaired and get a new lease of life under the refurbished banner. If we’re not, one broken fan becomes two or three piling up in a landfill. The majority of product failures happen outside of the warranty period, leaving little recourse for people to take the green option.

NZXT’s F-Series RGB Core single-frame fans will be available later this month, with F240 priced at $44.99/£39.99, F280 at $49.99/£44.99, and F360 at $69.99/£59.99. Admittedly, these MSRPs aren’t too bad, but they’re not remotely close to the single F120Q/P fan at $14.99/£12.99 and F140Q/P at $16.99/£14.99, which also debuted at the event. In my opinion, the future is far more passive, with no moving parts to break. I’ve reached out to NZXT for comments about my reservations.

Damien Mason
Damien Mason
Senior hardware editor at Club386, he first began his journey with consoles before graduating to PCs. What began as a quest to edit video for his Film and Television Production degree soon spiralled into an obsession with upgrading and optimising his rig.
SourcePC Gamer

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