Master Jedi Obi-WanMaster Jedi Obi-Wan
Did my research and bought two of these; one for my 3900X, and one for my 9700K. Btw, Scythe is Reeven's parent company. Edit: bumped it up to 4 stars due to excellent price v. performance at $38. For over $50, grab a Fuma 2 instead.PROS:-PRICE!-Great cooling performance on my stock 9700K. This cooler in Tier 3 of the the Linus Tech Tips CPU cooler chart, which I find to be very accurate. The Noctua U12A and Dark Rock Pro 4 are some of its peers in this tier, except they cost about twice as much.-Dual tower performance in a single tower fan. Single tower coolers look 100% better than than the ugly giant dual tower coolers, like the D15 or Assassin III. Dual towers have more fitment issues and tend to block or hide RAM slots.-Seems whisper quiet, at least compared to my whiny, annoying 120mm EVGA CLC AIO.CONS:-Mounting took longer than necessary due to confusing/vague instructions, which are mostly just pictures. The instructions indicated that the backplate would have three holes, with the middle hole reserved for LGA 1156/1155/1150 applications. There was no specific mention of LGA 1151 in this section. The included backplate, however, differed from the images in the instruction leaflet in that it only has 2 holes, not the 3 shown in the leaflet. The holes on the included backplate did not seem to line up with the holes on my motherboard, an MSI Z370 A-Pro. I can only assume that the backplate is not required for socket LGA 1151. I ended up mounting the cooler without the bracket. In a separate baggie, 4 additional washers and a leaflet were included stating that the washers were to be used with LGA 1151. I still worry that the cooler, somehow, isn't mounted correctly, or is placing undue stress on the motherboard PCB, even though it seems to be working well. Better instructions would clear up all the confusion.-Yellow fan? I actually ordered a can of flat black spray paint with the intention of lightly dusting the fan blades black. However, the fan's yellow color has grown on me. Another option would be to just replace the included fan with a black static pressure 140mm fan with the right specs.
PoiPoi
At $38.50, which seems to be its normal price now for the past 4 months, this cooler has some of the highest price to performance ratio on the cooler market. None of the coolers found at this price range can even hope to compete against it. With two fans installed, my stock ryzen 3700x only reached about 62 degrees under prime 95 small fft test. Unfortunately my cooler might have caused some bad contact between my cpu and motherboard socket through pressure, which resulted in weird ram malfunctions, but it can’t be replicated on other motherboards in my experience and according to a friend who bought the same cooler. So I’m not going to take off stars for that. Again, most air coolers of its performance tier cost almost twice as much. My copy also came with am4 bracket.