Scythe

Scythe is no longer an unknown name for those seeking quiet computing solutions. Their CPU coolers have gained a lot of deserved exposure and they continue to research products which can bring down PC noise level at affordable prices. While water cooling is still the most effective way to do this, air cooled heatsinks are more user friendly and they attract a larger audience.

They are releasing a new CPU cooler which comes with a 100mm sized fan squeezed in the middle; The fan mount system allows for larger and smaller fans to be installed, from 60mm to 140mm. A plug and play clip on system for all platforms (S478/S775/S939) is also incorporated into the design. This cooler is called "Mine", Mine in Japanese means Summit. The sound is "Mi" "ne".




Scythe is aiming at performance similar to their current high end (actively cooled) heatsink, the Shogun. Yet with easier installation, less weight and less material it'll be cheaper and more interesting.

They are also expanding their product range in Europe with this low noise power supply; it's almost ready for mass production and should be hopefully available from resellers this year. A large heatsink sticks out the back, while a temperature controlled fan will help keep things cool when running under heavy load.




For reducing hard drive noise they have developed the Silent Box version 2, dubbed the "Quiet Drive", it does away with the Heatlane technology but the design difference allows to hard drive to be cooled more effectively – and since the Heatlane technology is not cheap, without it the new product will become more interesting price-wise.



In the small outline below you can see how different layers of aluminum and soft anti-vibration sheets are placed around the hard drive and squeezed inside the box. The mounting holes at the side are new also and further help reduce vibrations from the hard drive being transferred to the enclosure.



If you don’t want to mess with a large box, you can removing hard drive vibration with their 2nd revision Stabilizer (can be seen in the photo above on the left), logically named "Hard Disk Stabilizer 2" with larger side plates it provides increase compatibility with a wide range of enclosures.



Scythe is constantly looking for new ways to keep high end PCs cool with passive cooling, on the photo above at the left you see a first design of their chipset cooling, it's not finalized and there might be some changes still. Next to it you see their NCU-3000, but unfortunately the increased size of the fins did not deliver the expected performance increase, so they are going back to the drawings boards to come up with a different design for the NCU series.

The Ninja is still the top performer for passive/low noise solutions. As an experiment they made a Ninja out of copper, while it did improve performance 2-3°C, the extra weight required changes to the mounting mechanism, so it's not going into the retail channels, you might see a few units appear here and there, as they made a small batch.