X-bit labs

Scythe Andy Samurai Master and Enzotech Ultra-X Coolers vs. Overclocked CPUs

Category: Coolers

by Sergey Lepilov

[ 03/08/2007 | 11:04 AM ]

We were lucky to get our hands on two new cooling solutions, so we decided to get down to another test session right away. In our new article you will see six highly efficient coolers tested on two platforms to determine the winner! Don’t miss it!

Table of contents:

• Scythe Andy Samurai Master: Overclocker’s Hope
  
• Enzotech Ultra-X: It’s All About Diameter, Not Number, of Pipes!
  
• Specifications
  
• Testbed and Methods
  
• Thermal Performance
  
• AMD Athlon X2 Platform
  
• Intel Core 2 Duo Platform
  
• Conclusion
  

It is spring now in the northern hemisphere which is normally followed by summer. It’s hard to tell how hot the next summer is going to be considering the latest climatic cataclysms, but an overclocker has to be prepared to everything. If you don’t want to lose your hard-earned extra megahertz of speed due to hot weather, this article is going to help.

The Japan-headquartered Scythe continues to scythe in the harvest of coolers they have grown up in the company labs. Their new cooler has a European name with a Japanese tint. It is called Scythe Andy Samurai Master. I will examine this cooler and check out its performance.

Besides it, I’ll show you a product from a new player in the cooling systems market. It is Enzotech with its first and only CPU cooler called Ultra-X.

Scythe Andy Samurai Master: Overclocker’s Hope

The cooler is shipped in a small cardboard box painted red and black against a lighter background:

The package is all covered with texts in English and Japanese that describe the cooler’s characteristics, key technologies and accessories, and carry some other, less useful, information.

Inside the package there is the cooler itself and a smaller box with the following components:

• Installation manual in English and Japanese
• A couple of clips to mount the cooler on LGA775
• Two clips to mount the cooler on Socket 478
• Two fasteners to mount the cooler on Socket 754, 939, 940 and Socket AM2
• A pack of SilMORE thermal grease

The new cooling system from Scythe is based on six nickel-plated copper heat pipes with a diameter of 6 millimeters. The pipes go out of the copper base and pass through the aluminum heatsink consisting of a large number of thin ribs:

A 120mm fan sits on top of the whole arrangement. It is secured on the heatsink by means of two wire brackets. At the cooler’s bottom there is another aluminum heatsink, 53mm tall. The Andy Samurai Master resembles the famous Thermaltake Big Typhoon, but the heat pipes in the new cooler’s heatsink are placed vertically rather than horizontally. I guess this placement facilitates the passing of air through the heatsink and should ensure higher heat dissipation efficiency overall.

See how dense the heatsink’s ribs are:

They are placed denser than in the Big Typhoon. The ribs in the Scythe cooler are grouped in threes and there is one additional rib between the groups:

This so-called Infinity Interleave Fin Structure may be familiar to you as it is employed in the Scythe Infinity cooler that has become rather popular among overclockers (for details see our article called SuperCoolers Return: Zalman CNPS9700 LED and Scythe Infinity).