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Cooling our system is important, we
want them to remain cool at all times no matter what we're doing.
Sometimes though the included fans in our cases just aren't enough
and we need a little extra help.
Today for review I've got the Nexus
WaveAir. This product attaches to a free PCI slot, mounted on the
outside of your case and either blows cool air in or extracts hot air
from inside of your case. It's an interesting little product that I
had high hopes for, but in the end I was let down by the
underwhelming performance of the WaveAir...
Read on to learn more...
Product
Name: Nexus
WaveAir
Author: Kristofer
Brozio
Sponsor: Nexus
Tech
Specs,Features or the Basic Info:
Nexus
WaveAir PCI Intake or Exhaust Cooling
Nexus WaveAir External PCI
Intake/Exhaust Cooling
WaveAir
MSRP per unit: $15.95
The Nexus WaveAir is very
suitable to get some fresh air in your case or get some hot air out
of your case through a PCI slot opening. Hot air can build up between
the PCI cards or above/below the video cards due to poor airflow.
Suitable solutions are limited as you often do not have a lot of room
in between PCI cards to have an extra cooling solution. Therefore, we
developed the WaveAir which is an external solution for some extra
active ventilation.
A standard 80 x 80 x 25mm case
fan fits inside the WaveAir. The shape of the WaveAir allows you to
still connect cables to any of the surrounding PCI slots. And the
wave air can be mounted two ways always; so you choose the side where
the "bubble" goes.
The WaveAir is very effective
for hot air extraction. So it is very effective as an extra exhaust
for your case. This is convenient for small form factor cases that
tend to really heat up at heavy usage because there is no room for an
extra fan.
If you have a PCI slot free,
the WaveAir is a good choice.
Specifications:
External Fan Duct for
80x80x25mm fan
Dimensions: 89.5 x 89.5 x 98 mm
[L x W x H]: 3.80 x 3.80 x 0.80
inche
Weight: 160 gram (incl. fan)
Materials: 160 gram (incl. fan)
Included
in package: WaveAir, 80mm Real Silent Nexus fan, PCI slot bracket
A
Better Look at Things:
The WaveAir comes in a little box,
inside we find everything packaged nicely.
 
Unpacking things we find an 80mm
fan, PCI bracket, the WaveAir itself and a fan cover.
The WaveAir is essentially a
plastic cone type design meant to direct airflow out of the case with
the 80mm fan.
 
The fan cover is plastic as well
and is meant to protect fingers and wires from getting caught in the
blades of the fan.
The included fan is a Nexus
SP802512L-03 model fan. It's rated 1500RPM with 20.2CFM at 17.6db.
 
The PCI bracket works like any
other, but this one has clips on it to attach the WaveAir to it.
Installation,
Testing and Comparison:
Here's what it looks like all
assembled, the power cables passes through the PCI slot into your
computer. One thing to note though is don't assemble it outside of
the case, it's very hard to take apart, the clip works very well, and
this also makes it difficult to remove from your system.
 
I've
got two 4870 video cards in my system, the main one I use for gaming
is a 1gig version so that's the one that I want to try and keep the
coolest, so that's where I installed the WaveAir. It went into the
top most PCI slot in my case which is a Cooler
Master Black Label Cosmos.
 
 
Here's what it look like from the
back:
 
The WaveAir can be installed two
ways, pointing up or down basically. Pointing it down didn't allow me
to attach my monitor cable to the card, pointing it up worked mostly,
but I had a very hard time accessing the USB and ethernet ports
closest to the WaveAir, in fact I couldn't use one of the USB ports
at all.
Installation problems might just
pertain to my system and how it's laid out, but I would think this
might be an issue for many people.
Now
installation issues aside let's see how it works, I used GPU-Z from Tech
Power Up to get my temperatures.
Ambient room temperature during my
testing was 26.5C
I ran Fur Benchmark/Stability test
to generate some heat from the main video card where the WaveAir is
located, and here's the results I got:
Hmm, not good I see, for some
reason my temperatures actually got higher while using the Nexus
WaveAir. I'm guessing it might have been pulling hot air across the
top of the card making it hotter? Not sure, but that's sounds
feasible doesn't it?!
My reasoning for installing it in
that location was of course because it wouldn't fit anywhere else,
and I was thinking that to have it pull air across the card would
help to cool it off a bit, apparently this isn't so.
I thought of reversing the fan to
pull air in, but since hot air rises it would just pull the exhausted
air from the video cards below it, thus pulling in mot air. So I
opted not to reverse the fan.
If you check out the Nexus
website, they've got pictures of the WaveAir installed on an SFF case
as an additional exhaust fan, which might indeed work well for
something like that.
HWReviewLabs took a look at it and found an 8 degree drop using the WaveAir, that
temperature though was for the VGA ramsinks, and they used an
infrared thermometer to check the temps. What that means exactly for
the performance of the WaveAir, I'm not sure, they seem to like it
though. They also had it installed below their card, so that might
make a difference.
...and that's the only review I
found of the WaveAir.
So, it didn't work well for me
obviously and it wasn't staying in my system, so trying to get it out
was a very large hassle. At one point I got so frustrated that I
even tried to rip it off by force, quickly realizing though that
might be a bad thing, I calmed down and fiddled with it for another 5
minutes until I finally got it uninstalled. Too much work was
involved in trying to get it out of my system, it should not be this
hard to uninstall a product!
Summary
and Comments:
The Nexus WaveAir is a product
that might work for some people and not others, as they say YMMV, or
your mileage may vary. The WaveAir seems like a good idea, but from
my testing it doesn't work well at all.
I can see this being used for an
SFF system to provide exhaust or even flowing in to provide cool air,
but I'm not sure as I didn't test it in that configuration.
The WaveAir dos have the issues
that you'll need to take into account, specifically the space where
you're going to be installing it, it can get in the way of any
connection that are close to it.
If you decide to uninstall the
WaveAir, be prepared for some work, good luck with that...
DragonSteelMods gives the Nexus
WaveAir a 2 out of 5 score.
Pros:
+Seems well made
+Easy to install
Cons:
-Can block ports depending on
system
-VERY difficult to uninstall
-Doesn't work for me!?
-Fan adds noise to system
I
would like to thank Nexus for the chance to review the WaveAir and for their support of DSM.
review# 575
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