Scythe SCSK-1100 100mm Shuriken Rev. B 3 Heat Pipes CPU Cooler

Pros: quiet and good airflow while it lasted

Cons: died shortly after a year

Pros: Easy to install.

Quiet. Nearly silent if your PC case has adequate air flow.

Great at cooling.

Decent mirrored finish on contact surface.

Cons: Not applicable. Worked as expected.

Pros: Low profile, awesome cooling performance, silent in my case

Cons: PITA to install

Other Thoughts: Love this fan's performance, size and quietness. Only thing is I suffered to install this right. Crazy amount of force had to be used, and the retention system is the awkwardest to control... It worried me.

Pros: Cheap as it is good quality and for the price it can't be beat; silent, and easy to install. Comes with everything. Great for HTPC because you don't hear that whining sound and it is better than the stock fan.

Cons: I wish it was under $25.

Other Thoughts: Install the heatsink before connecting the mobo to the case or remove all memory sticks they will interfere.

Pros: low profile fits in my HTPC perfectly. 100mm fan is almost inaudible, much better than the stock fan that comes with AMD A8 processor. the AM3 mounting brackets are a little tricky but by no means difficult to use, had it installed in about a minute.

Cons: the mounting brackets are kinda low quality, if they were designed a little better I would give it 5 stars.

Other Thoughts: Fits perfectly in my SilverStone ML03B Micro ATX case. if it were 2 mm taller it wouldn't fit. If you have this case, this is the fan for you

Pros: Quiet. Worked great for first year.

Cons: I've purchased 6 of these since October 2010 and May 2011.
4 have failed completely, leading to hard crashes because the fan is
not moving. Nothing gets them going again and I've had to replace
all of them. The last 2 haven't failed yet, but I expect them to do so
within the next 3-6 months.

Other Thoughts: DO NOT BUY THIS COOLER!

Pros: Very Quiet.
Short, so it fits in tight spots (but wide, so take care).
Did I mention quiet?

Cons: None that I could find.

Other Thoughts: Graduating from the stock Phenom II fan (small jet engine) to this was a very welcome change. I don't closely monitor heat in this particular computer, but I've had no shutdowns due to overheating, so that makes me happy. And no more airplanes are taking off from my desk, so that makes me happier.

Pros: Quiet. Low profile.

Cons: I have three of these fans in servers running 24/7 (and one in a machine
that gets turned on and off each day). ALL THREE machines have crashed
because the CPU overheats, and when I open the case to look, ALL THREE
fans had stopped moving. Two I got going again with a dust cleaner. But
one was clean and started making a grinding noise, starting up and then
stopping and then re-starting over and over without me touching it.

Other Thoughts: I really loved these quiet low-profile fans, but these are the only CPU fans I've had fail in the last 20 years. So sad.

Pros: The heatsink itself is very solidly built, and is surprisingly heavy for such a small product. Cools a Core i5-3450 very well (but then that's not exactly a scorcher of a CPU, haha). Short enough to fit in a Lian-Li PC-Q11 with a good centimeter or so to spare between itself and the PSU.

The PWM fan is very quiet, and is not only removable, but reversible (you can flip the fan over so air blows up from the mobo instead of down towards it). This is ideal in ITX cases where the PSU fan hangs over the motherboard; normally, the PSU and CPU fans would be competing with each other by trying to blow air in opposite directions, but by reversing this fan you can get them to work with each other by blowing air in the same direction.

Extremely good aftermarket choice for a powerful SFF system. Would have liked to have seen a direct heatpipe contact base, but c'est la vie.

Cons: The mounting mechanism is pushpin, identical to the Intel stock... except it's even harder to work with this one, because the top of the heatsink hangs over the pushpins themselves! This means you effectively have about a half inch of vertical space to work with as you push the pins down with all your might - and Lord help you if you want to actually twist them so they're locked into place. Mine is installed with all four pins pushed down, but only two (diagonal from each other) twisted and locked in, because I physically cannot grab and twist the other two. It's still quite stable, but it's nowhere near ideal.

I really don't understand why any company will make such a wonderful core product like this and then force you to mount it with such a boneheaded mechanism. I would have GLADLY paid a few dollars more for a proper backplate and screws to avoid this problem.

Other Thoughts: On an ASROCK H77M-ITX, the CPU is very close to the RAM slots. The heatsink itself (barely) clears the RAM area, but the crimped ends of the heatpipes overshoot it. If your RAM heatsinks are tall, you will likely have problems. I bought a set of Mushkin Blackline; while the RAM itself works wonderfully, one heatpipe presses *hard* against the inner stick.

Therefore, fair warning: If you use this with an ITX board - or any board where the RAM is very close to the CPU socket - DO NOT buy RAM with tall heatsinks! That means no G-Skill Ripjaws, no Corsair Vengeance, etc. Buy something low-profile (e.g. Mushkin Silverline), and content yourself with the knowledge that RAM speed doesn't really matter much anyway. ;)

I cannot speak for GPU clearance, as my build didn't include a discrete card.

Intel Core i5-3450
ASROCK H77M-ITX
2x4GB Mushkin Blackline DDR3-1600 [MISTAKE - taller-than-stick heatsinks conflict with this product's heatpipes]
Lian-Li PC-Q11B
Silverstone ST50F-P w/ PP

Pros: Decent price, excellent cooling* (*see Other Thoughts), but...

Cons: ...installing this push-pin-royal-pain-in-the-posterior is a great teacher of patience, and not something to do if you are having a "short-fuse" day.

I'm guessing that the engineer(s) who came up with the push-pin installation method and hardware invented this poor-excuse-for-technology AFTER they'd recovered from frontal lobotomies.

What Scythe really could do to make their customers who need this type of cooler outrageously happy would be to provide a motherboard backplate (that only has adhesive around the pass-through posts so it's easy install but also easy to take off when you want to / need to without ruining the motherboard) with tooless thumb-screw-style screws.

Other Thoughts: If you need "low-profile" keep the 12mm fan that comes with the cooler. I had more space and wanted more air moving, so I bought a 92x92-25mm fan to replace the 100x100x12mm fan provided so that I could move more air through the heat sink. There are a lot of great options for 92mm fans, but Noctua is one of the better if not the best one. With the 25mm fan, the temps I get cooling an i5-760 cpu are just superb compared to what I was getting with an Intel stock cooler.