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Posted 20 hours ago

Scythe Big Shuriken 3 Rev.B CPU Air Cooler, 120mm Low Profile (67mm Tall), Intel LGA1700, LGA1151, AMD AM5/AM4/Ryzen

£9.9£99Clearance
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About this deal

Also in confined spaces, airflow is a premium, and not just in how the chassis provides the influx of ambient airflow, but what in the system can be actively cooled. With the C-Style design, you almost get three coolers in one. Many cover some if not all of the memory, of course, they cool the CPU, but they also add direct airflow to the PWM of the motherboard. How many towers or AIOs can say that? Even more importantly, can they fit in an SFF chassis or Mini-ITX system? After plotting the data, I was honestly surprised by how well it performed compared to the other heatsinks. Temperatures are only slightly hotter or even on par in the 1.13-1.275 V range. However, unlike the other heatsinks, the Big Shuriken 3 cannot handle the voltage increase much past 1.275 V without the CPU hitting the TJ max, which would lead to throttling. So, the Big Shuriken 3 performed well in the low to mid heat range, but can’t keep up with the larger heatsinks during high heat loads.

The sound level in dBA was measured 10 cm from the intake fan with the fan speed set to 100%. Then, the sound level was estimated for other distances using the following formula: The Big Shuriken 3 is a mid-sized low-profile CPU cooler that measures 122mm in length, 122mm in width and 69mm in height with a weight of 475g. The noise of the Big Shuriken 3 paired with the slim Kaze Flex fan wasn’t the best and was basically identical to the Fuma with a standard Kaze Flex fan. The Big Shuriken 3 is a relatively dense heatsink and it’s paired with a higher RPM fan, so more noise is expected. However, these readings were done on an open test bench with the fans at max speed, so this is the worst-case scenario. So, having a typical enclosed PC at an average distance away would result in almost all the heatsinks in the chart below being reasonable, even at max fan speed. Nothing out of the ordinary to cause alarm about the noise levels here.

Apple please watch this.

The first thing to keep in mind when looking at the Big Shuriken 3 results is that it’s a low profile heatsink and much smaller than the rest of the coolers tested (no other low profile coolers are included). So, my expectation before testing the Big Shuriken 3 was that it would most likely be the worst-performing heatsink in my lot, and I wish I had more low profile coolers on hand for comparison. Realistically, if you are in the market specifically for a low profile cooler, then you won’t care how well it performs versus tower heatsinks and large AIO units since those wouldn’t fit your needs anyway. Ambient temperature was measured with a Fluke 52 II at ~1 inch from the intake fan(s). Then, subtracted from the recorded temperatures to get ΔT. Next, I fired up the 3D Mark CPU profile and compared it to my previous run with a 280mm AIO. The worst bench score had the Big Shuriken 3 only 4.7% behind a 280MM AIO and the peak speed was only 25MHz behind the peak speed on the AIO. Scythe has equipped the Big Shuriken 3 with a Kaze Flex Slim 120 PWM fluid dynamic bearing fan that can hit speeds of up to 1800RPM to produce up to 50.79CFM of airflow and 1.35mmH2O of air-pressure with 30.4dBA of noise. There is no doubt in anybody’s mind that Noctua produces one of the best lines of CPU coolers on the market. Noctua fans are excellent at cooling the CPU while also being very quiet and reliable.

Cramped space inside SFF cases means less airflow which leads to fans having to work harder to ensure components are running at acceptable temperatures. Higher RPM numbers mean more noise. And some low-profile CPU coolers can be rather noisy when near or at their peak RPM. Long story short, if you use a left handed A4 sandwich style case with Gigabyte board on AM4 platform, this cooler will be a headache to install. The fan on this Noctua cooler is an NF-A9x14 92mm that is capable of 1700 RPM. The cooler can be expected to produce about 19,9 dB(A) in terms of noise levels which is extremely quiet by comparison to other offerings.The build quality of the Big Shuriken 3 is quite good, everything works as intended, and even with the minor issues we ran into with a specific set of components, it is unlikely that many will run into what we did in the first place. However, it did have us feeling the pain of any LGA2011.2066 users, where quad-channel memory will need to be standard height. In heavy threaded workloads the Big Shuriken 3 will reduce performance a bit but still stay easily withing a reasonable temp range at a noise level that is not terrible. At gaming load with headsets, there is no noise worth mentioning and the performance and temps are awfully close to that of the 280mm AIO. A large product picture along with the company logo, the fan used and the mainboard/CPU compatibility are placed at the front of the box. Building a SFF (small form factor) PC based on an Mini-ITX board carries certain limitations with it. One of the biggest limitations is the CPU cooler height, which has to be shorter than what you have on regular air CPU coolers since most Mini-ITX PC cases are much smaller than regular cases. And finding the best low-profile CPU cooler can be a bit complicated since not all are made for every CPU.

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