Gelid Stella Review

Introduction

Gelid tries its luck on the already saturated RGB Fan market with a budget-oriented option called STELLA. Let's see what their version of an affordable, but good Case fan looks like!

What's in the Box?

Inside one of Gelid's Stella fans we found exactly what we'd expected, a Stella Fan as well as a 4-Set of Fan-Case screws, that's it.

Down below we also attached a short summary of the Stella's stats:

Installation

Installing a Gelid Stela is nothing out of the ordinary. Position it where it's supposed to be installed, screw in the 4 Fan screws, and you're done.

To power it on, we have a 500mm long PWM cable that can be connected to any one of the Mainboards case-fan headers.

In order to get the light show going, we need to connect the 3-pin ARGB connection to one of your Motherboard 3-pin ARGB headers. However, in contrast to the PWM cable, the ARGB cable comes with a build-in daisy-chain header that can be used to forward (split not enlarge) to the next fan or any other ARGB device you wanted to use.

Appearance

Due to the Stella being clearly a budget market-oriented Case fan, this is also what we can expect design-wise.

The fan itself is not built in a bad manner, nor does it feel cheap in any particular way.  However, the plastic used on the fan is quite thick, giving it both a rather chunky, but at the same time sturdy feeling.

RGB-wise, the fan turned out pretty standard, the central piece of the Fan blades houses a bunch of LED's while the rest of the total 24 LED's are hidden inside the two semi-transparent outer rings seeable from both sides.

Although we've seen this design applied many times before, Stella's implementation does not seem to have cheaped out on any lightning equipment as all of the lights are able to clearly spread across the whole span of semi-transparent plastic, and at a certain distance, the individual LED's are not seeable anymore.

Benchmark

We tested the Gelid Stella on our usual testbench using a 3700x.

While letting the Stella spin at 100% of its 1600RPM, it managed to keep the 3700x at 58°C above ambient.

On our Noise-to-Performance Graph, we are able to see that the Stella's did manage to outperform Asiahorse's 9002, Arctic P12 and Noctua NF-F12, however, as soon as the target temperature is lowered, and the other fan's efficiency kicks in, they are left in the dust.

Conclusion

Overall, the Gelid Stella is in a really weird spot. On one hand, it does not outperform a significant portion of our alternative test subjects in neither raw performance nor noise-to-performance.

However, due to the Stella being a clear candidate of a "Budget Oriented" fan, the price is just as important for the conclusion as its performance.

As it turns out, in its own -sub- 10€ (8€ as a set) category, there is not a single ARGB fan that outperforms the Gelid Stella. 
This creates that very special use case solely reserved for budget-oriented fans. Truth is, there are many better fans out there, however, if ARGB is the thing you are aiming for, with the best price-to-performance / total price as the second metric, the Gelid Stella will be your best option.

Therefore, if these two requirements are a situation in which you are in, we can recommend the Stella. However, if none or only one applies, there are better options.