Stealthily lives up to its name
Scythe’s fourth-gen flagship CPU cooler – successor to the highly successful Ninja 3Rev. B – has just launched, and it’sabit of a whopper. But while measuring in at 130 x 130 x 155mm, and weighing 900g (with a fan), it still manages to be some 180g lighter than its predecessor.
New for this version is the cooling fin design, which Scythe is calling T-MAPS (Three-dimensional Multiple Airflow Pass-through Structure). It adds another pair of fins to the MAPS design of the Ninja 3, without adding to the weight of the heatsink. It’s a neat trick, the design making it look like the fin unit is made up four separate stacks,with each aluminium fin around 0.4mm-thick and the matrix being made up of 36 of them.
The cooler uses six 6mm nickel-plated copper heat-pipes, which are U-shaped to give 12 heat flows, three per corner of the fin stack. These pipes are not in direct contact, but pass through the nickel-plated copper baseplate.
The Ninja 4 comes with a single Scythe GlideStream 120mm sleeve-bearing fan (4-pin PWM), which can fit on any of its four sides. To increase the cooling capacity, a second fan can also be fitted. That needs to be purchased separately, but Scythe does include an extra pair of wire-mounting clips in its box of bits. The fan spins between 300–1,500rpm, but has a handy speed controller built into one corner of the frame, giving three pre-set speed settings; High is 300–1,500 (29.5dBA maximum), Mid is 300–1,150 (23.5dBA maximum) and Low is 300–800 (12.5dBA maximum). Should you fancy doing away with the fan, the Ninja 4 is designed to take care of CPUs with a TDP of up to 53W passively.
Installing presents no real challenge at first, using Scythe’s excellent Hyper Precision Mounting System (HPMS), which makes the job of organising the mobo baseplate and cooler mounts a doddle.
Extra brownie points to Scythe for supplying a long-reach screwdriver and a spanner in its box of bits – you can use either to tighten the cooler-mounting bracket screws. However, although that sounds easy, those with large fingers will soon be cursing while trying to hold the bracket screw and tighten it, especially if, like our Asus Z97 Deluxe mobo, the heatsinks are close to the CPU socket. The one blessing is that the cooler-mount has lugs that lock into the top of the baseplate, so at least you don’t have to worry about it sliding all over the place as you lock the cooler into position on the HPMS.
And another thing. Because of the size of the cooler, memory modules with large heatsinks are a no-no if you want to mount the fan facing the memory slots. It covers the first two slots, so if you want to use the fan on this plane, low-profile memory is the way to go – there’s 3cm of clearance.
The Ninja 4 performs very well, keeping our test Core i7-4770K (Asus Z97 Deluxe, 8GB DDR3-2133MHz) cool at stock speeds through all three fans settings, in both idle and 100 per cent peak modes. When the processor is overclocked to 4.5GHz, the cooler in low fan spin mode can cope at idle. However, when the chip is pushed to peak settings, the temperature rises alarming quickly to around 100°C, which is why we cut the test short.
Better news is that the Ninja 4 does at least return to the idle temperature of both the standard and overclocked speeds remarkably quickly, when it’s no longer being pushed hard. The Ninja 4 also lives up to its name – it’s extremely quiet in operation, even when bing pushed throughout the three fan-speed settings. While the performance of the Ninja 4 is pretty impressive on its own, a quick glance at its price tag makes it all the more so. SIMON CRISP
SPECIFICATIONS
Form factor Tower cooler
Dimensions &weight 130 x 130 x 155mm; 900g
Fan size 120mm 4-pin PWM
Heat-pipes 6x 6mm nickel-plated copper
Socket support Intel: 775, 1150, 1155, 1156, 1366, 2011/ 2011v3; AMD: AM2, AM2+, AM3, AM3+, FM1, FM2, FM2+