Scythe Ninja Copper CPU Cooler Review

Heatsink Construction & Design


For anyone not familiar with the original Ninja cooler, this cooler is a fairly unique looking double 6 heatpipe tower design CPU cooler that looks a lot like a ninja Shuriken or throwing star when viewed from above. The easiest way to describe it to someone who has never seen one is that it looks like some giant took two regular tower coolers aligned them perpendicular to each other and then smashed them together into one big unit.

As already mentioned, the Ninja Copper is a fairly unique “double 6” heatpipe tower design cooler that can have multiple 120mm fans mounted to it. Some people would call this a 12 heatpipe system but in reality it is really only 6 large “U” shaped heatpipes that start at the top right side of the heatsink, go down and through the copper & aluminum base and then terminate at the top left side of the heatsink, If one was to cut this base in half what you would see is a thick copper base with 3 heatpipes running in a North/South orientation and 3 heatpipes stacked on top of it in an East/West orientation, all topped by an small heatsink.

Speaking of copper, even though this unit is very heavy, the copper fins are surprisingly thin and can even cut you if you are not careful. While the fins themselves are thin and do bend easily they are actually fairly durable. This is of course because they are made entirely out of copper which is very soft and malleable. What this adds up to is a surprisingly durable fin assembly that you can easily bend back into shape with a pair of pliers if a fin does become bent. In total there are 23 of these .3mm fins which give the Ninja Copper heatsink more square centimeters of cooling surface area than just about any other cooler on the market today.


One interesting thing about the construction of the Ninja Copper is how Scythe attaches the fins to the heatpipes. Unlike many coolers that either solder the fins together or use a topping method to hold them all in place Scythe uses a very unique friction mounting technique. Each copper fin has holes punched in it to allow the heatpipes to go through them, but these holes are not clean edge holes; rather the hole itself is a little undersized and instead of punching a circular hole in the metal, the metal is bent up into a bottle cap looking arrangement. This extra surface contact makes this mounting arrangement very efficient in transferring heat from the heatpipes to the copper fins.

What was also nice to see was that the heatpipe ends were not just pinched off as on some units but actual capped as well. These caps help to increase the rigidity of the fin assembly and as an added benefit it makes the Ninja Copper a very sturdy heatsink that displays very little flexing considering its size.

The only down side to the Ninja being made of out heavy, expensive yet very effective copper is the unit's overall weight. This cooler weighs in at over 1.13 kilograms when the fan is attached. To put this in perspective, this is over double the Intel recommended max weight for Socket 775 CPU coolers and its even 230 grams more than even Intel’s BTX max specifications. Backplate or no, that is a lot of weight and stress to be putting on a motherboard and I would be very careful and slow in moving my computer around when it is installed. Please don’t get me wrong this coolers weight is not dangerous to use, it is just that it does have a lot of momentum and if you bang around your case (as happens at most LAN parties) it will put undue stress on your motherboard.

Overall this unit is constructed like a big, heavy copper brick and is the very definition of brute force cooling. There is nothing wrong with this approach; after all, main battle tanks don’t put much emphasis on finesse either and look how effective they are at their jobs! Where this is an Anniversary Edition, no expense was spared in its creation and no shortcuts were taken since this is Scythe’s flagship model and they did not skimp out on its construction. Overall this cooler is all business where form follows function. The fact that it looks and feels like it could be a very expensive, very exotic morning star / mace (sans handle) I’m sure is quite…..accidental.