If you drive them lower and have instead a greater amount of diodes to compensate it, you will still have a good depth penetration. It will get even better the more diodes you have and the more diffuse the light will get because of this fact.
It is a common misunderstanding when people think that the depth penetration is getting worse when you use mid-power LEDs compared to COBs or other more powerful lightsources.
Here is a comparsion of 16 CXB3590 against 18 FB22B (4' F-Series) both at the same luminous flux. That is 16 vs. 2592 light sources. 12" min. distance for the CXBs and 4" for the FB22B. You can see that both the uniformity and the depth penetration are a little bit better with the stripes.
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