Endorfy Fortis 5 Dual Fan review

Endorfy is an established brand in the US, but is currently expanding into other markets with its budget-conscious cases and coolers amongst other components. Today, we’re looking at one of its mid-range air coolers, the Fortis 5 Dual Fan. Retailing for a little under $50, this is very competitive and sits a little above the cheapest dual fan coolers out there, but has the advantage of a single tower heatsink design and larger fan.

The compact heatsink sandwiched between two fans means the Fortis 5 Dual Fan is able to clear memory slots on most motherboards, allowing you to pick whatever memory modules you desire. This can’t be said of larger coolers, especially those with twin heatsinks that often overhang one or two of the memory slots, limiting module clearance. This does mean that there’s potentially less surface area to work with when it comes to cooling as well as more restriction in terms of airflow, which can reduce efficiency at lower fan speeds.

To counteract this, the cooler includes two fans, as its name suggests, and at the front is a large 140 mm fan that tops out at 1,400 rpm, while a smaller 120 mm fan helps to draw air through the large heatsink, also hitting 1,400 rpm at top speed. This is relatively constrained in terms of speed, but should mean the Fortis 5 Dual Fan is quiet too. The single heatsink has six 6 mm heat pipes that are polished down to a smooth copper plate on the bottom.

If you’re looking for RGB lighting the sadly, you’ll be disappointed. Endorfy does offer RGB coolers, but the Fortis 5 Dual Fan is a simple silver and black affair with no lighting at all to keep costs down. There’s a generous amount of thermal paste included in a separate tube that should be enough for a couple of applications and there’s also no fear of accidentally wiping off the base if it was pre-applied.

If you’re worried about CPU cooler height limits in your case, then at 159 mm, the Fortis 5 Dual Fan should fit into any case that claims it can handle a standard tower cooler. As for motherboard socket compatibility, as expected it will work on all current mainstream desktop sockets suck as Intel’s new LGA1851 and AMD’s Socket AM5, going back at least a decade. But while it doesn’t support AMD Threadripper sockets, it does cater for Intel’s LGA2066.

There’s no fan splitter cable in the box, but thankfully the 140 mm fan cable splits off to provide a second 4-pin connector for the 120 mm fan, so both can be powered by a single fan header. Installing the fans to the heatsink was straightforward, but a little fiddly, as wire clips usually are. You’ll need to fit them after you install the cooler, though, as they need to be removed to get at the securing screws on the base plate.

Installation required a backplate for Intel’s mainstream sockets and with no adhesive pads to hold it to your motherboard while you reach around to the top side, you’ll need to hold it in place, which means it could be tricky installing the cooler without removing your motherboard. You then secure four nuts to the top side onto which a large cooler mounting plate is secured using another four nuts. It’s quite the construction set, but apart from taking a little longer than some other coolers, it is a simple process.

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Next it’s time to apply the thermal paste an secure the cooler, which has two fixed screws that link up with pins in the mounting plate. You can only rotate the cooler 180 degrees once the plate is installed so it pays to check the orientation and how things will sit before you install the cooler.

PC Gamer test rig
CPU: Intel Core i7 14700K | Motherboard: Gigabyte B660 Gaming X DDR4 | Memory: Corsair Dominator Platinum DDR4 3466 | SSD: 512GB Samsung 980 Pro | GPU: Nvidia RTX 4090 Founders Edition | PSU: MSI MEG Ai1300P PCIe5 | Case: BarrowCH Rhopilema Test Bench

It wasn’t a surprise to see the Endorfy Fortis 5 Dual Fan sitting at the lowest point in noise levels of any cooler we’ve tested recently as its fans do spin relatively slowly, but if you’re particularly noise-sensitive the low reading of 42 dBA at full speed was also backed up by decent sound quality with no whine or high-pitched tones, and mid to low speeds are inaudible from inside a typical PC case.

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Those slow spinning fans do come at a cost of cooling, but it still performed well and only topping 90°C in lengthy full load tests such as Cinebench and x264 encoding. Even here, it kept a steady 95°C throughout Cinebench’s 10-minute stress test and held steady at 99°C in the X264 test, just avoiding throttling. In our extended Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition test, it peaked at 79°C, which was 10°C warmer than Noctua’s mighty NH-D15 G2, but cooler than the Be Quiet! Dark Rock 5.

In addition to the Noctua cooler, all of the AIO liquid coolers we’ve tested recently managed much lower temperatures, but then they’ve all cost treble what the Fortis 5 Dual Fan retails for or more. The biggest advantages enjoyed by the liquid coolers were in Cinebench, with the Arctic Liquid Freezer III 360 A-RGB for example seeing nearly 20°C knocked off the load temperature after 10 minutes.

Ultimately the Endorfy Fortis 5 Dual Fan offers some of the best processor cooling you’ll see for less than $50 considering the noise levels, and we were impressed with the quality of the sound too, which will definitely appeal to anyone that’s noise-sensitive and actively avoid whiny liquid cooler pumps or high spinning fans. It might not be idea for coping with extended workloads with Intel’s 12^th, 13^th and 14^th Gen Core i7 and Core i9 models, where even our Core i7 14700K was a little too toasty for our liking during video encoding, but if it’s a rare occurrence you’ll be fine and gaming was perfectly acceptable.

If you want a simple, affordable, quiet and effective cooler that can also handle nearly any current CPU with ease then the Endorfy Fortis 5 Dual Fan ticks a lot of boxes.