be quiet! Light Wings 140 High-Speed

Introduction

While the 120mm form factor was already a huge success, let's take a closer look at the High-Speed Version of be quiet!'s 140mm Light Wings!

With 9 heavily bend wings, these 2200RPM quick Light Wings promise to not only deliver a stunning light show but simultaneously press enough air through anything- to keep any system- cool!

What's in the Box?

Included in a box of be quiet! Light Wings 140mm High Speed, we will find the expected 3x fans, but also some quite exciting goodies.

Ignoring the boring 3x sets of screws and some informational pieces of paper, there will also be an RGB Hub included in the box.

Powered by SATA Power and a 3-pin ARGB Hub, we can use this RGB HUB to spread the signal coming from your motherboard to 6 additional ARGB devices. Please note the repeatedly used word "Hub" instead of controller. As the difference might not be immediately apparent from the box's design, this little RGB container does not "create" any sort of light show. Instead, it ONLY copies an existing light show onto 6x additional ARGB ports, meaning that without an ARGB port on your motherboard or some off-brand controller, there will still be no shining lights.

Installation

Installing a be quiet! Light Wing 140mm High-Speed is nothing out of the usual. Once the fan is positioned where you want it to stay, screw it in using the provided screws. To get the fan to spin we can use the 4-pin PWM connection and hook it up to the motherboard while the 3-pin ARGB connection does the same just on a different port. To make our lives a little bit easier, be quiet! added an ARGB splitter to the end of each Light Wing's ARGB header. This way we are even able to -not- use the included ARGB Hub and instead just daysi-chain every Light Wing fan that we would like to install to a single header on our motherboard, a cleaner, and simpler solution.

Appearance

Similarly to their 120mm High-Speed counterparts but in contrary to their 140mm Regular Speeded siblings, the 140mm Light Wing High-Speed models are coming with a Static Pressure focused 9-Wing Design. These heavily bend and therefore significantly longer wings are able to push the air a lot harder whilst coming off a "stronger".

Static pressure focused or not, the 140mm HS version still managed to deliver the same level of quality that we came to expect due to every other set of Light Wings we have witnessed before.

But before we end this section, we are legally required to add some words about the RGB. Similarly to every other Light Wing, the 140mm Version did not fail to deliver the same level of a high-quality light show. With an Milky-Acrylic Ring around the fans, the 20 LED's in there managed to win us over again. Additionally, (and similarly to every time before) we have 4 rounded cutouts in a ring around the fan in the back making sure that the fans look good even from the back.

Benchmark

While letting the Light Wings 140mm High Speed cool down our 3700x, they managed to keep the CPU at 44°C, 2°C behind the 120mm sized Light Wings.

On the Noise-to-Performance end, it doesn't look too good either, although the 140mm High Speeds were able to score the second place for max performance compared to every other Light Wing. They only managed to do so due to them brute-forcing their way up the ladder. Even compared to a regular 120mm Light Wing, the 140mm HS's will be far behind for as long until the smaller mini-version just stops getting quicker.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, the 140mm High-Speed version of the Light Wings doesn't quite live up to the expectations that we've had.

Despite them looking like actual monsters and even coming in an appropriate Quality level. Their performance doesn't reflect that. Sure, they are able to score second place compared to every other Light Wing, but their Noise-to-Performance ratio just looks horrible.

Being comparable to something like an Arctic BioniX F120, we expected these 140mm Static Pressure Monsters to perform significantly better.

But the most shocking aspect of their performance is that until 1500RPM, the regular 140mm Light Wings are far, FAR ahead of their High-Speed counterparts. Therefore,  for a Case and Airflow-focused use case, we cannot recommend the Light Wing 140mm High Speed. Instead, if high-performance is needed, the 120mm High Speed is better suited, or the regular 140mm if Noise-to-Performance is to be favored.