The Scythe Zipang

Well, what can I say; it's huge. In the picture below, I've placed a screw next to it, just to give you an idea of scale.

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The whole cooler is dominated by the whopping 14cm fan that sits atop it. It's nothing particularly fancy, but has black blades and a central Scythe logo.

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The whole thing is powered by the standard 3pin adaptor. In a lot of more recent coolers, the 4pin adaptor has been adopted more than than the 3pin, but having this provides better backwards compatibility for older motherboards without the 4pin header.

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Underneath said fan is a huge array of aluminium fins. These are designed to have the largest surface area possible to increase heat dissipation.

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Flipping the beast over we get a good look at the core. This is made of solid aluminium and actually leads straight on to a small heatsink as well as having all the heatpipes running to it.

In it's factory shipped state, it comes with a see through plastic sleeve over it to protect it from dirt, grime and any minor scratches that could occur during transit.

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The surface itself is very reflective which always looks good but doesn't necessarily mean that it's flat. It does however, at least show attention has been paid to the core, fingers crossed it means it's flat.

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Sitting atop the core is a small, standard looking heatsink. I say small, really it's only a bit shorter and thinner than a stock AMD or Intel cooler found in CPU retail packs; you could also say it's about the size of an overkill chipset cooler. Either way, this is just an extra 'sink, seemingly tacked on to drop those temperatures ever so slightly more than what the array of heatpipes and fins could do alone.

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Speaking of heatpipes, the Zipang has 12 of them, all copper, all shiny. They run from the base of the cooler, through the array of aluminium fins, and out the other side by a few mm.

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Heatpipes are often used in this manner, as they allow for heat to move quickly from an area of high temperature to an area of low temperature. To read how this is achieved, please read our glossary entry here.

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