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Scythe ASHURA CPU Cooler Review

Cooling/CPU Cooling by leeghoofd @ 2013-04-17

Japanese cooling giant Scythe has become a very popular brand amongst cooling enthusiasts. Their Mugen series coolers were a great balance between superior thermal dissipation and price. However these particular tower coolers were pretty humongous in design. Times evolve and installation issues with new enclosures and especially compatibility when installing heatspreader equipped RAMs, needed to be addressed. The noise generated also remains a critical factor when buying an aftermarket CPU cooler. Scythe's latest Ashura CPU cooler is on paper the perfect harmony off a high end tower cooler, with a slanted heatpipe design, cooled down by a powerful and silent 140mm fan.

Test Setup and Methodology

S Sabretooth X79 motherboard

Intel i7-3960X OC'ed at 4500MHz 1.35Vcore

G.Skill 16GB 2133MHz C9 rams

Western Digital 1TB Green Caviar HDD

2 x ASUS Geforce GTX480 videocards

Corsair HX1000W Power supply

Corsair C70 Vengeance case

Prime95 is still our favourite CPU torture test. By selecting the Custom test and setting 12-12K we force the CPU to go straight flatout. After 30 minutes we verify in RealTemp the maximum load temperature results accross the 6 cores. For the idle temperatures we just let the sytem during 15 minutes warm up, practically doing nothing then just monitoring the temperatures.

For the motherboard readouts we trust the ASUS Sabretooth Thermal Radar application, included in the AI suite. Reading out chipset, PWM, mobo temperatures, all these being monitored during the CPU torture test.

Noise measurement done via Corsairs Reviewers' Guide, measuring the generated noise at 1 meter from the fan front. Fans were hooked up straight to a PSU via a molex adapter. Noise tests were only conducted at 12V.

The Madshrimps testbed comprises of the following parts:

ASUS Sabretooth X79 motherboard
Intel i7-3960X stock and OC'ed at 4500MHz 1.35Vcore
G.Skill 16GB 2133MHz C9 rams
Western Digital 1TB Green Caviar HDD
ASUS Geforce GTX480 video card
Corsair HX1000W Power supply
Corsair C70 Vengeance case with Air Series Fans installed.
Ambient air temperature is 20°C

Prime95 is our CPU torture test. By selecting the Custom test and setting 12-12K, we force the CPU to go straight flat out. After 60 minutes we verify in RealTemp the maximum load temperature results across the 6 cores. For the idle temperatures we just allow the system to warm up during a period of 15 minutes. Just basic idling at either stock for the air cooled setups and/or 4500MHz for the AIO units, doing nothing more then just monitoring the temperatures.

The monitoring software we use is RealTemp version 3. And the output results are the average out of three runs.

We compare the brand new Scythe Ashura versus three other air coolers: the single fan Alpenföhn Matterhorn Pure (similar price league ), Thermalright True Spirit 120M and the Zalman XPS14, this chart is only with the I7-3960X at stock clocks (3900MHz due to the ASUS Turbo implementation). Once we add the different All In One Cooling liquid solutions in the mix, the CPU speed gets cranked up to 4500MHz.

Noise measurement for the fans is done via Corsairs Air Fan Reviewers' Guide. Thus measuring the generated FAN noise at 1 meter from the Fan's front. Fans were hooked up straight to a PSU via a molex adapter. Noise tests are only conducted at 12V.

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