Adata XPG debuts two-click reversible, magnetic Hurricane Mag case fans — power six fans off one cable

Official renders of black, white versions of the Adata XPG Hurricane Mag.
(Image credit: Adata)

This morning, Adata XPG announced in a press release that it would introduce its new XPG Hurricane Mag series of 120mm case fans alongside a new BTF form factor case, the XPG Starter Air BTF.

The XPG Hurricane Mag fans primarily caught our interest because they're comparably more innovative. They're reversible, meaning they can be configured to spin and push air in either direction. They're also magnetic and snap together for easier installation and power, allowing up to six magnetically attached fans to be powered off a single cable.

That's all pretty nifty, but we should take a moment to discuss case airflow and how the direction of your case fans can influence it. To simplify, your PC case is considered to have a "positive pressure" airflow configuration if you have more intake fans sucking air in than exhaust fans blowing air out, creating more air pressure inside your case. More exhaust creates "negative pressure" and can be comparably powerful, but will result in a dustier PC.

With the ability to switch fan direction with a single button, it becomes a lot easier for users to switch between these setups at will or experiment more broadly with their case cooling without needing non-matching fans to fill in the gaps. For example, you could choose to have your intake fans and their RGB facing inward but still sucking in air through your front panel, unlike traditional RGB fans.

Adata's XPG Hurricane Mag case fans are 120mm RGB fans rated for up to 2000 RPM. Airflow is estimated at 54.82 ± 10% CFM in a standard configuration and 49.27 ± 10% CFM in a reversed configuration. The fan is rated to last for 160,000 hours (roughly 6666 days) and has a two-year warranty period.

Adata will sell the XPG Hurricane Mag fans in individual quantities or bundles of 4. Unfortunately, we can't yet speak to the value proposition of singular Hurricane Mag fans, bundles, or even the Starter Air BTF case because Adata opted not to reveal this information in the press release.

Christopher Harper
Contributing Writer

Christopher Harper has been a successful freelance tech writer specializing in PC hardware and gaming since 2015, and ghostwrote for various B2B clients in High School before that. Outside of work, Christopher is best known to friends and rivals as an active competitive player in various eSports (particularly fighting games and arena shooters) and a purveyor of music ranging from Jimi Hendrix to Killer Mike to the Sonic Adventure 2 soundtrack.

  • bit_user
    The article said:
    To simplify, your PC case is considered to have a "positive pressure" airflow configuration if you have more intake fans sucking air in than exhaust fans blowing air out, creating more air pressure inside your case.
    I get that you're trying to keep it simple, but I'd still advise people to just add up the CFM (or m^3/s) and compare the totals of the intake vs. exhaust fans, since not all fans in a case are typically the same size.

    The article said:
    ... creates "negative pressure" and can be comparably powerful, but will result in a dustier PC.
    I'm not sure there's much difference, unless you have dust filters on your intake fans. If so, then the way positive pressure reduces dust is by avoiding any bypassing of the dust filters, so that the only air getting into the case will have passed through the filters.

    My personal experience has been that positive pressure + dust filters results in a much cleaner case. Many years ago, I had a Pentium 4 (Prescott) with a Zalman flower-type heatsink that turned out to be a dust magnet. I'd have to open the case and give it a thorough dusting a couple times per year, in order to avoid CPU overheat alarms and thermal throttling. After that experience, I vowed to find a better way. Since then, I've generally run positive pressure + intake filters and found it quite effective. Now, whenever I open up the cases, everything looks very clean.

    I've seen people claim that negative pressure cools better, but I once saw a study I think probably Lian Li did, where they showed positive pressure was more effective in reducing hot spots and (I think) resulted in lower overall temps. I've looked for it, but can no longer find it. Anyway, I'm not certain this holds for all positive pressure setups, but might depend somewhat on the case actually being designed for positive pressure.

    I've seen a lot of people trying to use proxies like smoke, in order to show that negative pressure works better, but smoke doesn't act or behave the same as hot vs. cold air. Probably the best way to test the theory is to run a machine in a gaming loop and look at what CPU, GPU, memory, and SSD temps you actually achieve. I would further advise having the exhaust flow rate of a negative-pressure setup configured to equal the intake flow rate of the positive pressure setup.

    For me, I would even consider it a worthwhile tradeoff to use positive pressure at the expense of cooling efficiency, if it came to that.
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