DOES SIZE MATTER? | Fan Showdown S4E6

Summary

In this episode of Fan Showdown, Major Hardware pits four creative fan designs against the reigning “boss,” the Cheater, which has become the new benchmark for performance. The contenders are the Mach e GT, inspired by the Ford Mustang Mach-E; the Bat Fan, inspired by the city of Batman in Turkey; Florian’s Cone, which features a thickened front hub to improve airflow; and Rory’s Cheater Beater, a larger 180 mm design aimed squarely at defeating the Cheater. After sound testing and smoke testing, the Cheater Beater proves the quietest among the group and also delivers the strongest airflow of the challengers. Still, the original Cheater remains unmatched, maintaining the top overall ranking even after being retested. The episode closes with an invitation for viewers to submit their own designs and try to dethrone the current final boss.

Highlights

• The Mach e GT brought automotive-inspired fan design to the showdown 🚗
• The Bat Fan turned a Turkish city name into a clever fan concept 🦇
• The Cone experimented with hub geometry to guide airflow more efficiently 🌬️
• The Cheater Beater went bigger with a 180 mm diameter and stator veins for better flow 📏
• Smoke and sound tests showed the Cheater Beater was promising, but still not enough to beat the Cheater 🎯

Key Takeaways

• Bigger really can mean better — at least when it comes to trying to move more air 😎
• The Cheater Beater was the quietest of the new challengers and also the strongest performer among them 🔥
• Florian’s thicker hub design aimed to improve airflow by focusing on where smoke seemed to be drawn in 🌪️
• The Bat Fan and Mach e GT were cool creative builds, but they landed behind the top two contenders 🛠️
• The original Cheater stayed undefeated, proving it’s the new final boss of the series 👑

Overview

This episode kicks off with a fresh batch of fan designs submitted specifically to challenge the current king of the series: the Cheater. Major Hardware introduces four contenders, each with a different idea for improving airflow, reducing noise, or just getting creative with the shape and structure of a fan. The tone is playful, but the competition is serious because the Cheater has become a nearly impossible target to beat.

Each fan brings something different to the table. The Mach e GT leans into automotive styling, the Bat Fan draws inspiration from a Turkish city, the Cone tries to improve airflow with a thickened hub, and the Cheater Beater takes the boldest route by simply going bigger. The episode spends time explaining the design logic behind each build before moving into the tests.

In the end, the Cheater Beater performs best among the newcomers, especially in airflow, while also being one of the quietest. But the original Cheater still dominates the overall board, reinforcing its status as the final boss. The episode wraps with a challenge to the audience to keep designing, keep experimenting, and maybe one day finally knock the Cheater off the throne.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:30: Season 4 Setup and the New Benchmark Season 4 opens by framing the Fan Showdown as a quest to beat the Noctua A12x25, a challenge the series has largely surpassed each season. The host introduces a new dominant benchmark called the Cheater, whose performance now towers over nearly every fan tested, prompting a wave of submissions claiming they can finally dethrone it.
• 01:30 - 03:00: The Turk and Community Banter The episode introduces fan showdown contestants and explains the goal of beating the Cheater, a new dominant benchmark in the series. It highlights the Mach e GT, a fan inspired by the Ford Mach e and built to resemble its wheel design, noting the creator’s effort to adapt the rim into an actual fan.
• 03:00 - 05:00: Florian's Cone Fan and Hub Design Florian’s design uses a cone-shaped fan with a thickened front hub that tapers toward the back. The idea came from smoke testing, which suggested air is drawn in around the hub, so enlarging the front hub diameter could improve airflow efficiency while keeping the rear slimmer. The chapter also briefly introduces Rory’s larger “Cheater Beater” fan, which uses a bigger housing and stator veins to move more air and possibly outperform the cheater.
• 05:00 - 07:00: Noise Testing: Size vs. Quiet Operation This chapter compares fan noise levels, noting the Bat Fan at 50.5 dBA and the Mach E GT at 48.8 dBA, while describing the Cheater Beater as one of the quietest fans tested though not the absolute quietest.
• 07:00 - 08:30: Airflow Smoke Testing and Efficiency Observations The smoke test showed that the Cheater Beater pulled in a lot of air but appeared somewhat inefficient, with visible puffs and turbulence at the intake. By contrast, the Bat Fan’s two-blade design made the blade-air interaction easy to observe, highlighting how the airflow moved through the fan.
• 08:30 - 10:00: Performance Results and Final Rankings The speaker reports performance results for several fan designs: the Mach e GT achieved 544 ft/min, the bat fan 572 ft/min, the cone 603 ft/min, and the cheater beater 639 ft/min, making the cheater beater the top performer in the segment.

DOES SIZE MATTER? | Fan Showdown S4E6 Transcription

• Segment 1: 00:00 - 02:30 fan showdown season 4 episode 6 now when we started the fan showdown the whole idea behind this whole series was could we create a fan that could outperform one of the best fans on the market that fan being the nocta a12 x25 well you guys made pretty short work of that task almost every single season we have at least one fan that does better than the a12 x25 it's pretty impressive however a new boss has appeared on the horizon the cheater and the put up some some pretty impressive numbers numbers that are almost inconceivable when compared to almost every well literally every other fan we've ever tested on this series and because of that the fan showdown email I'm starting to notice that there's more and more fans being sent to me that have like a header or the body of the email saying that this fan is going to take down the cheater once and for all and today one of those fans is making an appearance and will it take down the cheater first up we have the Mach e GT which was created by Eric The Mach e GT is inspired by you guessed it the Mach e or the Ford Mach e if you don't know much about that car Eric said that he's been watching the fan showdown for quite some time and he noticed in season 3 episode 4 there was a fan that was designed around the Tesla rim and he wanted to make another fan inspired by an Eevee so he chose the mock e and create a fan that looks exactly like the rim now although this looks like the Mach e GT wheel Eric did spend some time making that rim or this design of a rim into more of a fan so it should do better than the Tesla Rim that we saw previously next up we have the bat fan which was created by Turk now one may think that this fan the inspiration for this fan was from the DC Universe specifically the uh superhero Batman but You' be wrong Turk said the inspiration comes from the city Batman
• Segment 2: 00:00 - 02:30 in Turkey in addition I have a prepared statement from The Turk uh just in case anybody from DC is watching he says I The Turk have redesigned this logo so that it does not directly infringe on any copyrighted or trademarked material sounds like fair use to me now the Turk did go on to say that he loves the fan show and he's been watching it for a while and um instead of you know studying for his heat transfer midterm in college he spent that time instead
• Segment 3: 02:30 - 05:00 watching the fan showdown which I really do appreciate as a fellow professional procrastinator myself respect next up we have Florian and their fan cone the cone looks like a pretty normal fan at first but it has something that makes it differ from its counterparts that one thing is the Hub now from the front of this fan you might notice that the Hub looks a little extra thick but from the back it almost looks normal now the idea behind this comes from the fact that Flor noticed that during the smoke test it seems like a lot of the smoke is drawn in at the Hub of the fan and they thought that by increasing the front diameter of the Hub and then having it slim back down towards the rear it'll prod produce better air flow and get you more efficient air flow through the fan dis and hopefully perform better than if it was just a standard small Hub we'll have to watch in the smoke test to see if that is the case now at the beginning of this episode I made mention to a lot of fans showing up on the fan showdown email address the email address where fans are submitted that say that they are directly going for the cheater and this next one is one of those this is the cheater beater and it was created by Rory Rory says bigger is better Rory is hoping that the increased size of this fan will give it the advantage over the cheater the fan is comprised of three parts the fan itself an extension piece that connects it to the a12 x25 Hub and a housing that has some Staters built in to improve air flow now the cheater beater when compared to like a normal 120 mm fan is bigger it's about 180 mm in diameter and the fan itself that he chose to use the fan he designed was inspired by the dark Rock 4 CPU air cooler which uses the silent Wings fan which is a very popular cooling fan that does very well and I like this idea I like the idea of going bigger you know you need to beat the cheater and air
• Segment 4: 02:30 - 05:00 flow let's just try to get more air and force it down the same exact size tube and see if that improves our performance I mean it could and I really like how this housing has those Stater veins built into it to try to improve the air flow or at least the the laminer flow of the air going through the wind tunnel it should at least be quieter than cheater if we know anything about larger fans like if you buy like a 200 mm cooling fan for your PC they're always pretty quiet in the sound test the cheater beater came in around 45.9 DBA the cone came in at 47.2
• Segment 5: 05:00 - 07:30 DBA the bat fan came in at 50.5 DBA and the Mach e GT came in at 48.8 DBA now the cheater beater is pretty quiet it's one of the quietest fans we've seen on the show it's not the most quiet fan on the show but it did do very well now will all this size translate into good airf flow let's find out [Music] [Music] now one thing I did notice while doing the smoke test was that the cheater beater while drawing in a large amount of air seemed to do so pretty inefficiently if you look at the front or the intake of the fan you're going to notice puffs or turbulence every now and then and I really don't know if that's helping the the performance that much they probably isn't on the other hand though if you look at the bat fan because there's only two blades you can really notice or really see the interaction of the blades and the airf flow you can almost see how it sounds
• Segment 6: 07:30 - 10:00 so performance-wise how do we do the Mach e GT came in at 544 ft per minute the bat fan came in at 572 feet per minute the cone came in at 603 feet per minute and the cheater beater came in at 639 feet per minute putting the cheater beater in first place the cone in second the bat fan in third and the Mach e GT in fourth overall though the cheater the OG cheater does continue to maintain first the cheater beater placed fourth overall the cone 9th the batfan 12th and the Mach e GT 13th I know what you're thinking cuz I thought the same thing you're looking at the board and you're like how can the cheater really put up the numbers that shown that are shown on the the board I mean they're all running on the a12 x25 Hub how does these three pieces produce a fan that does so much work I thought the same so after I tested the cheater beater I put together the cheater again retested it and yeah it's still an absolute unit so yeah the cheater really is incredibly efficient and good at moving air and that that's your new Final Boss to beat in the fan showdown it's no longer the a12 x25 it's the cheater and I think you guys can do it I I know you can you you you've taken down many of fans don't be afraid of the cheater we can you can destroy it as well but for now it's still going to be first place and if you want to get involved in the fan showdown uh check the link in the description below essentially um go to my thinge account download the models and the drawings that I've provided to give you the critical Dimensions you got to hit to make sure that your fan fits on the a12 x25 Hub there's also some models there if you want some templates to get you started then take your design save at least an STL file and send that file at least the STL file to the fan showdown at gmail.com and we'll see if you can finally topple the greatest fan we've ever seen
• Segment 7: 07:30 - 10:00 cheater