Hey guys.
Today I am bringing you a quick review of Scythe YASYA CPU cooler. Its Scythe's premium tower cooler aimed at performance oriented customers.
Effectively cooling modern chips at high clock speed is still a challenge in Indian environmental conditions where climate is hot and in many metros its hot and humid. So let's see how this heatsink manages to perform on highly overclocked system and how it fares against already established players in this arena.
Here are the Specifications first.
Compatibility
This is truly universal cooler out there. It is compatible to every consumer socket that has existed for last 5 years. It fits all LGA sockets right from LGA 775 to LGA 1366 and LGA 1156. Same is the case with AMD sockets. All sockets since Socket 754 to the modern AM3 is supported out of the box.
So you need not worry about compatibility here. A bonus point earner before we get to actual performance.
First look at the cooler itself.
Scythe is a Japanese firm, they might not be manufacturing things in Japan, but it shows in their products. And it shows right away. The packaging is small and only big enough to safely accommodate the cooler. No flashy packaging or big box here like we are used to seeing these days.
The first time you take this heatsink in hands, it feels heavy in hand. And it is at almost 850grams. But its not exceptionally heavy. We are used to 800grams+ heatsinks by now. Almost all tower heatsinks are this heavy.
As you can see, this is 6 copper heatpipe cooler. Top of the heatpipes is covered with this decorative metal caps.
The Yasya has unique fin design. the Yasya used saw tooth shaped triangular fin design. To add to that, all fins are not of same design and size. Yasya uses multilayer, multi-shape fin structure. This is supposedly done to maximise the airflow. But this does mean there are relatively sharp edges everywhere on the cooler. I did experience scratches and cuts while installing this cooler thanks to my big hand and big digits which do not work well in tight spaces.
There are grooves in the fins to fit the fan clips. The cooler has ability to use two 120mm fans, but only one set of fan clip is included which is little disappointing.
The overall built quality of this cooler is solid. It does not feel like a tank like the Noctua counterparts, but it feels solid. Fins don't see to bend easily like they do on most thermalright coolers while you handle it. But you need to be careful not to exert too much pressure on top and bottom fin.
As mentioned before, Yasya uses 6 copper heatpipes. The heatpipes pass through fins in two rows to achieve optimum heat dissipation.
The base of the cooler is protected by the plastic film which you must peel off before use.
The base also has the fins to dissipate heat on the top side. Something similar to what we have seen in recent DeepCool heatsink review I did. You can see the notches here where the mounting clips lock in. This is one of the better push pin mounts I have seen. No need of tools. The pushpins and AMD locks just lock in the notches you see here and are easy to remove. Definitely an innovative way to attach the mounting accessories to the cooler.
The base is nickel plated and has perfect mirror finish. This is one of the best base finishes I have seen.
Here is the impression of the CPU IHS onto the base.
As you can see, it makes perfect contact with the CPU IHS. Two thumbs up in this regard.
Now coing to the bundle. It is almost complete package.
It comes with all mounting accessories and more than a decent fan which comes with fan controller. It is high speed fan capable of over 100cfm airflow at max speed. It is not too noisy even at that speed, but little trade off you must make for performance. Included controller lets you adjust it to your preferred noise and performance level.
You can see that lot of attention was paid to the retension mechanism. Scythe has managed to build a universal mounting cooler with just 2 set of clips. One for AMD and one for Intel.
By adjusting pushpin positions on the same arm, you can use it with any LGA socket. And Same set of AMD clips work on all AMD socket. I am not a big fan of pushpins to be honest, but they work well here. The cooler never felt unsecure even while moving the mounted motherboard and system around. And pushpins work exactly like the stock Intel pushpins work.
The only downside is inclusion of just 2 (1 set )of fan clips. This means you cannot add second fan out of box without using some sort of ghetto homemade zip tie mount which is not ideal. I hope these are available as cheap optional extra and easily available as they are quiet different in size and shape than other coolers. So only these will work properly on this cooler. Also my one complaint is that the fan clips are very rigid. I understand they have done this to avoid loose fit and rattles that may be the result of gap between fan and the heatsink, but it is really hard to get the fan clips on when heatsink is already mounted on the board. It was hard job to do it on bench table. So it will be harder to do it inside the cabinet.
Here it is mounted on the motherboard.
Other than this one kink, there is not much to fault about the entire bundle.
Test setup
My primary LGA1366 setup was used to test this heatsink.
CPU : Intel Xeon W3520 Lapped IHS @ 4.2Ghz (1.200v vcore)
Motherboard : ASUS TUF series Sabertooth X58
RAM : Patriot Viper II DDR3 2000 at 1600Mhz 7-6-6-20 1T
Power Supply : Tagan BZ 1300W
Cabinet : Open Air Lian Li T60 Bench Table.
Fans used : Included Scythe Slipstream 120mm fan + 2x UF120 fan for dual fan testing of DeepCool. Stock fans on Noctua NH D14.
How I tested.
Testing heatsinks is not a easy or simple job if you want to do things properly.
For the test to be uniform, I always tested the heatsink during afternoon period with climate control setting on air conditioning set to moderate 26C which was allowed to run for 30mins to bring the entire room to between 26-27C before booting the PC.
My machine is away from windows so there is no chance of direct sun heat affecting the temperatures.
For temperature measurement, I used electronic thermometer to measure ambient which was always maintained between 26-27°C.
All 4 heatsinks were installed by redoing the TIM application. The thermal paste used was Thermalright Chill Factor 3. Scythe fan was used for single fan testing. I decided not to do dual fan testing on Scythe as mounting 2 fans on this cooler is very tedious job thanks to the tight fit of the fans and entire design of the heatsink. The dual fan numbers of DeepCool cooler are for reference only. While stock Noctua fans were used to test NH D14. This was done as NH D14 is designed to perform with that central fan.
All the coolers were tested again as I was not using them in A70F anymore. So I havent used any numbers from previous reviews for this.
For torture testing, the best program one can use is Linx GUI. The burn in tests were conducted as follows.
• PC was allowed to boot and remain idle for 10mins to note down idle temperatures.
• Temperature was monitored using Real Temp and CPU-Tweaker
• LinX is set to use all available ram for maximum stress on the entire CPU subsystem.
• It was allowed to complete 5 runs while CPU-tweaker and Real Temp were left logging the minimum and maximum temperature.
• I have made countless runs over past 2 months to ensure results are indeed accurate
So here is an example of the screenshot of LinX runs completed and temperature logged using both Real Temp and CPU Tweaker. The screenshot below is actual run of YASYA..
Click on thumbnail for full view
Results.
Intel Xeon W3520@ 4.2Ghz, 1.200v, Scythe Slipstream fan @ Max speed, Noctua NHD14 with stock fans.
I must admit before proceeding that these results are slightly flawed. The results were on open air bench table. And from experience I can tell you that Noctua D14 has tremendous advantage on open air. It's already massive surface area helps it pull some impressive results on open air.
And to add to that the high speed fan of Scythe suits VenomousX. This is why you are seeing it close up the gap between itself and Gamer Storm it showed last time around.
Scythe really gets outperformed by all other coolers here. It's not bad by any means as it can easily handle my Xeon at 4.2Ghz and is only marginally higher in temps on 2 cores. But it does get outperformed by the others on the other 2 cores. There is little to no difference at idle temperatures.
Here is reference performance figures of VenomousX and Deepcool Gamer Storm with 2 66cfm DeepCool 120mm fans on open air bench table.
Conclusion.
This was always going to be little tricky review as I really do not have time to test this cooler inside a cabinet under normal operating conditions. Actually I do not have any cabinet at the moment
Thermalright Venomous X and Noctua NH D14 had established themselves as best coolers money can buy depending on what you were looking for. If size was not an issue, Noctua NH D14 will be my default choice.
To add to these issues, it is a fact that testing coolers on open Air tends to give advantage to big coolers like D14. And as I said before, VenomousX loves fast fans.
It was never going to be easy fight for Yasya, and it shows. It does get outperformed by all the other coolers I used. But do keep in mind that all these coolers are high end offerings from respective company.
I am sure Scythe knew this from the begining. They have made an effort to make this a simple, no nonsense, easy to use, easy to install universal cooler. No other heatsink tested here today has universal socket compatibility out of the box. None what so ever. They even managed to maintain legacy support for AMD 754 and 939 sockets.
This heatsink is suppose to retail at around Rs.3200 through our registered dealer Phoenix (Xtreme Grafix ). And that does make it better value than VenomousX which is more expensive and does not come with fans, and NH D14 which is lot more expensive than this.
And that pretty much where it belongs. It's a good heatsink for its price. It does not perform as good as the big guns, but it does not cost as much. The only complaint I have is lack of additional fan clips which will enable performance oriented users to use two fans.
My Score Card
Design : 9.5/10
Functionality : 8/10
Performance : 8/10
Value for Money : 9/10
Overall : 8.5/10
--- Updated Post - Automerged ---
Please Digg this review here : http://digg.com/news/technology/scythe_yasya_cpu_heatsink_review
Today I am bringing you a quick review of Scythe YASYA CPU cooler. Its Scythe's premium tower cooler aimed at performance oriented customers.
Effectively cooling modern chips at high clock speed is still a challenge in Indian environmental conditions where climate is hot and in many metros its hot and humid. So let's see how this heatsink manages to perform on highly overclocked system and how it fares against already established players in this arena.
Here are the Specifications first.
Compatibility
This is truly universal cooler out there. It is compatible to every consumer socket that has existed for last 5 years. It fits all LGA sockets right from LGA 775 to LGA 1366 and LGA 1156. Same is the case with AMD sockets. All sockets since Socket 754 to the modern AM3 is supported out of the box.
So you need not worry about compatibility here. A bonus point earner before we get to actual performance.
First look at the cooler itself.
Scythe is a Japanese firm, they might not be manufacturing things in Japan, but it shows in their products. And it shows right away. The packaging is small and only big enough to safely accommodate the cooler. No flashy packaging or big box here like we are used to seeing these days.
The first time you take this heatsink in hands, it feels heavy in hand. And it is at almost 850grams. But its not exceptionally heavy. We are used to 800grams+ heatsinks by now. Almost all tower heatsinks are this heavy.
As you can see, this is 6 copper heatpipe cooler. Top of the heatpipes is covered with this decorative metal caps.
The Yasya has unique fin design. the Yasya used saw tooth shaped triangular fin design. To add to that, all fins are not of same design and size. Yasya uses multilayer, multi-shape fin structure. This is supposedly done to maximise the airflow. But this does mean there are relatively sharp edges everywhere on the cooler. I did experience scratches and cuts while installing this cooler thanks to my big hand and big digits which do not work well in tight spaces.
There are grooves in the fins to fit the fan clips. The cooler has ability to use two 120mm fans, but only one set of fan clip is included which is little disappointing.
The overall built quality of this cooler is solid. It does not feel like a tank like the Noctua counterparts, but it feels solid. Fins don't see to bend easily like they do on most thermalright coolers while you handle it. But you need to be careful not to exert too much pressure on top and bottom fin.
As mentioned before, Yasya uses 6 copper heatpipes. The heatpipes pass through fins in two rows to achieve optimum heat dissipation.
The base of the cooler is protected by the plastic film which you must peel off before use.
The base also has the fins to dissipate heat on the top side. Something similar to what we have seen in recent DeepCool heatsink review I did. You can see the notches here where the mounting clips lock in. This is one of the better push pin mounts I have seen. No need of tools. The pushpins and AMD locks just lock in the notches you see here and are easy to remove. Definitely an innovative way to attach the mounting accessories to the cooler.
The base is nickel plated and has perfect mirror finish. This is one of the best base finishes I have seen.
Here is the impression of the CPU IHS onto the base.
As you can see, it makes perfect contact with the CPU IHS. Two thumbs up in this regard.
Now coing to the bundle. It is almost complete package.
It comes with all mounting accessories and more than a decent fan which comes with fan controller. It is high speed fan capable of over 100cfm airflow at max speed. It is not too noisy even at that speed, but little trade off you must make for performance. Included controller lets you adjust it to your preferred noise and performance level.
You can see that lot of attention was paid to the retension mechanism. Scythe has managed to build a universal mounting cooler with just 2 set of clips. One for AMD and one for Intel.
By adjusting pushpin positions on the same arm, you can use it with any LGA socket. And Same set of AMD clips work on all AMD socket. I am not a big fan of pushpins to be honest, but they work well here. The cooler never felt unsecure even while moving the mounted motherboard and system around. And pushpins work exactly like the stock Intel pushpins work.
The only downside is inclusion of just 2 (1 set )of fan clips. This means you cannot add second fan out of box without using some sort of ghetto homemade zip tie mount which is not ideal. I hope these are available as cheap optional extra and easily available as they are quiet different in size and shape than other coolers. So only these will work properly on this cooler. Also my one complaint is that the fan clips are very rigid. I understand they have done this to avoid loose fit and rattles that may be the result of gap between fan and the heatsink, but it is really hard to get the fan clips on when heatsink is already mounted on the board. It was hard job to do it on bench table. So it will be harder to do it inside the cabinet.
Here it is mounted on the motherboard.
Other than this one kink, there is not much to fault about the entire bundle.
Test setup
My primary LGA1366 setup was used to test this heatsink.
CPU : Intel Xeon W3520 Lapped IHS @ 4.2Ghz (1.200v vcore)
Motherboard : ASUS TUF series Sabertooth X58
RAM : Patriot Viper II DDR3 2000 at 1600Mhz 7-6-6-20 1T
Power Supply : Tagan BZ 1300W
Cabinet : Open Air Lian Li T60 Bench Table.
Fans used : Included Scythe Slipstream 120mm fan + 2x UF120 fan for dual fan testing of DeepCool. Stock fans on Noctua NH D14.
How I tested.
Testing heatsinks is not a easy or simple job if you want to do things properly.
For the test to be uniform, I always tested the heatsink during afternoon period with climate control setting on air conditioning set to moderate 26C which was allowed to run for 30mins to bring the entire room to between 26-27C before booting the PC.
My machine is away from windows so there is no chance of direct sun heat affecting the temperatures.
For temperature measurement, I used electronic thermometer to measure ambient which was always maintained between 26-27°C.
All 4 heatsinks were installed by redoing the TIM application. The thermal paste used was Thermalright Chill Factor 3. Scythe fan was used for single fan testing. I decided not to do dual fan testing on Scythe as mounting 2 fans on this cooler is very tedious job thanks to the tight fit of the fans and entire design of the heatsink. The dual fan numbers of DeepCool cooler are for reference only. While stock Noctua fans were used to test NH D14. This was done as NH D14 is designed to perform with that central fan.
All the coolers were tested again as I was not using them in A70F anymore. So I havent used any numbers from previous reviews for this.
For torture testing, the best program one can use is Linx GUI. The burn in tests were conducted as follows.
• PC was allowed to boot and remain idle for 10mins to note down idle temperatures.
• Temperature was monitored using Real Temp and CPU-Tweaker
• LinX is set to use all available ram for maximum stress on the entire CPU subsystem.
• It was allowed to complete 5 runs while CPU-tweaker and Real Temp were left logging the minimum and maximum temperature.
• I have made countless runs over past 2 months to ensure results are indeed accurate
So here is an example of the screenshot of LinX runs completed and temperature logged using both Real Temp and CPU Tweaker. The screenshot below is actual run of YASYA..
Click on thumbnail for full view
Results.
Intel Xeon W3520@ 4.2Ghz, 1.200v, Scythe Slipstream fan @ Max speed, Noctua NHD14 with stock fans.
I must admit before proceeding that these results are slightly flawed. The results were on open air bench table. And from experience I can tell you that Noctua D14 has tremendous advantage on open air. It's already massive surface area helps it pull some impressive results on open air.
And to add to that the high speed fan of Scythe suits VenomousX. This is why you are seeing it close up the gap between itself and Gamer Storm it showed last time around.
Scythe really gets outperformed by all other coolers here. It's not bad by any means as it can easily handle my Xeon at 4.2Ghz and is only marginally higher in temps on 2 cores. But it does get outperformed by the others on the other 2 cores. There is little to no difference at idle temperatures.
Here is reference performance figures of VenomousX and Deepcool Gamer Storm with 2 66cfm DeepCool 120mm fans on open air bench table.
Conclusion.
This was always going to be little tricky review as I really do not have time to test this cooler inside a cabinet under normal operating conditions. Actually I do not have any cabinet at the moment
Thermalright Venomous X and Noctua NH D14 had established themselves as best coolers money can buy depending on what you were looking for. If size was not an issue, Noctua NH D14 will be my default choice.
To add to these issues, it is a fact that testing coolers on open Air tends to give advantage to big coolers like D14. And as I said before, VenomousX loves fast fans.
It was never going to be easy fight for Yasya, and it shows. It does get outperformed by all the other coolers I used. But do keep in mind that all these coolers are high end offerings from respective company.
I am sure Scythe knew this from the begining. They have made an effort to make this a simple, no nonsense, easy to use, easy to install universal cooler. No other heatsink tested here today has universal socket compatibility out of the box. None what so ever. They even managed to maintain legacy support for AMD 754 and 939 sockets.
This heatsink is suppose to retail at around Rs.3200 through our registered dealer Phoenix (Xtreme Grafix ). And that does make it better value than VenomousX which is more expensive and does not come with fans, and NH D14 which is lot more expensive than this.
And that pretty much where it belongs. It's a good heatsink for its price. It does not perform as good as the big guns, but it does not cost as much. The only complaint I have is lack of additional fan clips which will enable performance oriented users to use two fans.
My Score Card
Design : 9.5/10
Functionality : 8/10
Performance : 8/10
Value for Money : 9/10
Overall : 8.5/10
--- Updated Post - Automerged ---
Please Digg this review here : http://digg.com/news/technology/scythe_yasya_cpu_heatsink_review
