I have been following the PC industry for almost 20 years, and during that time, PCs were always considered to be “boring” beige boxes, only suitable for working with documents and spreadsheets. Even when the multimedia revolution happened with post-Windows 95 operating systems, and PCs were capable of playing videos, games and other multimedia content, the looks of the average PC stayed mostly the same – same size, same colour and same boring looks. Of course there were people among the community who wanted to change that, and so at some point people started to mod their boxes in order to make them more presentable, more impressive visually. The rise of the Internet communities helped in that regard because the modders started to publish the fruits of their labour in various forums and webpages, thus giving incentive to even more people to want something more from their PC’s appearance.

Fast-forward to today, PC modding has hit mainstream big time. Nowadays companies sell pre-modded cases, pre-modded PSUs, pre-modded pretty much everything, with impressive neon lights, UV-coated material and cool-looking fans becoming the norm these days. Today on DriverHeaven we’re going to take a look at a very cool set of fans for your PC, called the Turbine Card Cooler XT and manufactured by The Card Cooler, a company specializing in cooling solutions and based in Ohio, USA.

The Fans

Have you ever seen a solution implemented, and thought “Gee, why hasn’t anyone thought of this before”? That’s exactly what came to mind when we received our sample of the Turbine Card Cooler XT. First of all, here are the fan specifications:

This cooling system is comprised of two 120mm fans, which are screwed together using a blue frame, as you can see in the pictures provided. Of course it’s a given that you may unscrew them and use them as stand-alone fans for your PC – it all depends on your needs and wants really. These certain fans stand out from the rest of the crowd mainly for two reasons: the first is that there is a double layer fan blade design, which the company claims improves air pressure. The second reason is the blades: we counted 16 blades per fan, which is definitely more than most 120mm fans have on the market, and it definitely improves air flow.

The looks are always important, and the Turbine Card Cooler XT does not disappoint. As you can see from the pictures (and is evident from the product’s name) the fan blades resemble a turbine and that alone makes you happy to own a pretty good looking piece of cooling equipment ready to be used with your PC. Customization of the way the fans look doesn’t stop there though, because for those of you who don’t like the turbine look (which was our favourite to be honest) can still detach the turbine fan heads from the rest of the fan and use the supplied fins to give the fans a more “ordinary” look. The fan itself had a titanium coating (with the The Card Cooler also offering silver coating and transparent blue models as well) and we also noticed small wires that come out from the centre of the fan and stretch to the four corners of the fan's frame. These wires are the reason the fans lights up with a blue colour when you turn them on, adding more to the model’s good looks.

As far as connection options, you have both 3-pin and 4-pin connectors, which means you can either connect the fans directly at your motherboard or connect them to your PSU. The model we tested had no rotation speed controller, so there was no ability to control the speed of the fans, but you can get a fan speed control device with built-in alarm system for a mere $1.99 more).