On Our Desk - 12

Antec TriCool 120mm

Manufacturer: Antec
UK Price: £11.99 (incl. Delivery)
US Price: $19.99 (Free delivery)

It’s a fan and, to be honest, I don’t know what else to say about it. It spins inside your computer and should help to make the PC cooler, ideally noiselessly.

In the end, stumped about how to start of the review of this particular item, I asked resident tech-guru Richard for help – what is there to say about a fan, I asked.

“Well, talk about the LEDs. How noisy is it? Does it have a fan controller? Stuff like that,” Richard said.

“No, no, no,” I insisted. “How do I make jokes about a fan? How do I make the article entertaining?”

“Well, it’s a fan. If it isn’t any good then you could say that it blows?”

Shocked silence followed for a moment or two while I absorbed the risqué joke that Richard had suggested. “Rich,” I said, “that joke just sucks.” (To which I replied, "your Mum su..ARGH!" as I promptly got punched in the side. - Rich)


The Antec TriCool though neither suck nor blow as it turns out, offering some decent performance despite the fact that some delightful Antec representative shoved them into Harrys hands at the i34 LAN festival and insist that he take them for free.

To look at these fans you’d think they are the type of pimped out ‘l33t’ fans that you might expect a fourteen year old ‘hacker’ to shove in his case. The translucent fins and frame, the promise of bright LEDs – all of it points towards blatant pseudo-geekery far detached from the subtleties of our earnest hobby.

Fortunately though, looks can be deceiving. Turned on, the fan doesn’t light up nearly as aggressively as you might think it would and produces little more than a soft orange glow. That low level of illumination is going to be a plus or a minus depending on how you look at it, though we’ve never thought that orange was a good colour to be seen glowing inside a case.

Green or blue? Certainly. They make a case look cool and kind of alien – like it was powered on kryptonite or something. Orange though? That makes it look like it’s powered on Sunny Delight. Leave it that way for too long and the whole PC will turn orange and end up looking like something you left in than tanning booth.


The Antec comes with a short cabled fan controller that lets you switch it between 1200, 1600 and 2000 RPM, powered off a three or four pin. The CFM ranges between 39, 56 and 79. All good stuff, but noise-wise the news is a bit more mixed.

On the high speed setting the fans is overwhelmingly noisy, easily drowning out the sound of other fans or the whimpering of a foolish games journalist who just injured himself by dropping the box for the fan into his crotch. Oof!

On lower settings the fan is an awful lot quieter, though the downside is that the airflow is reduced. As always it's a case of swings-and-roundabouts; you can have excellent cooling or you can have low noise. The major plus here though is that the Antec Tricools are one of the few fans with a speed controller built in, so you don't need a seperate fan controller.

If you're unlikely to be fiddling with speeds however then you might want to consider if you really want extra cables and wires wobbling around inside your chassis.

Regardless, the medium speed setting provides a nice middle-ground between the noise and speed and while a new system fan like this is rarely a required purchase, you could do a lot worse than with the Antec TriCool 120s.

Verdict There's plenty of fans out there, but thanks to the fan controller and noise performance, the Antec does something a little different for not too much cash.