CORSAIR AirGuide Technology Explained

With the launch of our 4000 Series and 5000 Series cases, many of you may have noticed the addition of new case fans with something we call CORSAIR AirGuide Technology. Fans with CORSAIR AirGuide Technology, such as the newly released SP RGB ELITE series, feature anti-vortex vanes which help to channel concentrated airflow for improved cooling performance for your components.

Case Fans… How Do They Work?

Before jumping further into what makes AirGuide compelling for cooling, let’s review the purpose of a standard case fan. A typical case fan is designed to pull cold air from the intakes of your computer or push hot air out as exhaust. When installed properly, case fans will promote the exchange of heat from your components/heatsinks/radiators and the air to allow your components to cool off.

When installed in a typical mid-tower case, the airflow of a standard case fan will look something like this:

The air pulled through a standard case fan immediately spreads out into the case and while the air does have a general velocity away from the fan, it’ll quickly dissipate the further away from the fan blade it travels.

When installed in a typical mid-tower case, the airflow of a fan equipped with CORSAIR AirGuide Technology will look something like this:

Comparing these two example, you’ll notice that the airflow from an AirGuide fan is much more concentrated, reaching further into the case before eventually dissipating.

What about Performance?

If we had to put it simply, more fresh air = generally better temperatures. You can brute force this by installing as many fans as your chassis will take and cranking them up to their highest setting, but picking the right fan for the job will result in much better performance and a quieter system.

We tested two identical systems using only SP RGB ELITE fans in one and SP RGB PRO fans in the other:

As you can see from the graph, upgrading to higher airflow SP RGB ELITE fans on our test system resulted in improved CPU temperatures on our air cooled system!

Another notable benefit of AirGuide fans is higher static pressure when compared to similar case fans without anti-vortex vanes.

For example, here’s some data from a test bench where we compared the performance of the AirGuide Technology-equipped SP RGB ELITE fans to our SP RGB PRO fans. We measured coolant temperatures on a H150i ELITE CAPELLIX cooler, controlling for ambient temperature, CPU clock speed, voltage, pump profile, and fan RPM.

At the same speed of 1000 RPM, SP RGB ELITE fans demonstrate a noticeable improvement in temperature control over the older SP PRO fans when used on the radiator of an all-in-one liquid CPU cooler.

Conclusion

Many may think that a fan is a fan as long as it spins and pushes air, but fan performance can’t be just pinned to how fast you can spin the blades. Seemingly small improvements like adding anti-vortex vanes to the rear of a fan like we did on our SP RGB ELITE can help give your system more thermal headroom, allowing you to keep your temperatures low and your framerates high.

To join the discussion around CORSAIR case fans, check out our communities at the CORSAIR User Forums, Discord, or Reddit!