Scythe Ninja 5 Air CPU Cooler, 120mm Single Tower, Intel LGA1151, AMD AM4, Dual Quiet Fans, Black Top Cover

TL;DR: Below is a very detailed review. The cooler is completely silent even set at max speed (800 rpm).It lowered a Ryzen 5 3600x temps by about 10°C in both "idle/low usage" and max load, despite a potentially incorrect thermal paste application (might've used too much). This cooler is a keeper for a 3600x. Check the tip on "3) Installation:" on this review if you're having issues with the metallic clips of the fans.1) The situation:My room tends to be extremely hot during summer (on average over 30°C) and I was concerned that the stock cooler wouldn't be enough. And my concerns were verified quickly after summer really got hot. When I was gaming on a hot afternoon (around 32-34°C in my room), CPU reached 87°C. I definitely needed an upgrade in order to avoid throttling and also potentially damaging my PC over time.On top of that, the old stock cooler used to loudly increase and decrease speeds whenever the processor used more power/increased frequency, which is pretty much always when you got from not moving the cursor to doing anything on the PC. If I set it to full speed, it was too noisy too, so that wasn't an option.2) The fix:After installing the the Ninja 5 cooler, temps decreased about 10°C. And I can set it to 100% fan speed (800 RPM) while making close to 0 noise. In fact, the most noisy fans currently are the ones on top of my case. But the annoying noise described earlier is gone thanks to the constant speed in the Ninja 5 fans.3) Installation:Installation was sort of easy. They include everything you need, even a magnetic tip screwdriver. I had problems getting the fans in the metallic cooler. I hadn't installed a CPU cooler with detached fans in years. The manual wasn't quite clear (it's just pics) so I had to google how to properly clip the fans to the cooler.Also, don't forget to remove the plastic sticker that covers the base of the cooler. Do it as soon as you're going to install. I almost forgot.Pics show the cooler in a Aerocool One Eclipse case. It's certainly much bigger when compared to the stock Wraith Spire cooler. There's plenty of vertical room fortunately, so putting the glass lid on later wasn't an issue. However, the fans don't align with the exhaust fan in the case. Dunno if that's common or not.Tip: Follow the manual and make the clips get inside the fan holes. That much is easy to follow on the manual. Then you gotta pull on that "bent part" of the clip towards the metallic indentation on the cooler and "clip" it there. Yes, you gotta apply force towards the cooler (or away from the fans basically) while holding the fan with one hand. Don't worry, the things won't break. They're more bendy than expected. Check the pic I added at the end, that's where the clips get in.4) The tests:The graphs in this review were generated with CPUID HWMonitorPro, and were done under the following parameters:a) Prime95 running a small FFTs test, 15 ±2°C room temp, AMD Wraith Spire Cooler (pre-applied thermal paste).b) Prime95 running a small FFTs test, 18 ±2°C room temp, Scythe Ninja 5 (Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut thermal paste)Note: the room temps are lower than 30°C because I ran the tests at night, not during the day.Important: I did not use the included thermal paste in the box. I applied the one mentioned above, with the included spatula. I never had done it that way, and I was experimenting, so I might've miscalculated the amount and used too much. Temps could be even slightly lower if I re-applied but with less paste.5) The results:a) Max temp was 94,5°C at node 0 (red line). It took less than 1 minute to get there, which made me shutdown the test otherwise I was risking damage to the processor. Max wattage reached to about 95 watts.b) Max temp was ~84,3°C at node 0. It didn't go past that temperature during the 4 minutes I ran the test. Note that my room was also about 3 degrees hotter than in the first test, so in theory you could take 3 degrees off that.Also note that the max wattage reached around 108 watts. That's 13 more watts of power that the processor was being fed and despite that the temps didn't get close to 90°C6) Test conclusions:A 10-13°C temperature reduction on max load. Higher power consumption with the Ninja 5 cooler (meaning that the CPU wasn't throttling itself). Completely silent at 800 max rpm.I'm 100% satisfied with it. I don't think this fans has any cons at the price point and performance.7) Some clarification:For those that don't know what Prime95 is: it's a program that stresses the processor doing several calculations in parallel. It produces a lot of heat in the process, which is pretty useful for testing how effective the cooling is and if the clock speed/voltage is stable.The black dotted line (Package): it's a built-in offset in AMD Ryzen processors. I don't really know the purpose of it, but it tends to over-report temps based on what I read online. Might be a built in safety protocol to throttle the processor if the temps are too high.That's it! Thank you for reading. I hope what I wrote was useful to you :)

I needed something to help tame the AMD FX9590 with a bad Corsair H110 liquid cooler that was some years old. Almost everything I found about this processor required "liquid cooling" but this was my first liquid-cooled setup and I am not fond of water cooling, too many parts to go bad and this one was basically DOA.BACKGROUND: My wife's brother was fixing her up a computer for gaming since he had recently upgraded his. We got this unit in January 2020 and it was hard to keep running from the start. It would run a week, then be dead for several (not even POST) then run again for a week, then a cycle repeat. After six months of this, I was ready to fix this issue. The Corsair had been very loud when it did run, throttling the fans to their fastest speeds, adding a ton of ambient heat to the computer room, the CPU regularly ran at 70 C or higher under a load, it was awful! I didn't' want to go with another AIO, and I did hours of research into what cooler might work and decided to buy the Scythe.This cooler is VERY large, but it did fit into our Mid-ATX case. We have the NZXT H510 case and it is super snug, almost touching the glass door. Due to the enormous size installation seemed tricky, but I almost never install an after-market heat sink (perhaps two in 25 years) so in an abundance of caution I slowly proceeded. Thermal paste is included and I used that instead of what I had on hand. They give a very nice screwdriver to reach the screws that are recessed into the radiator fins of the unit. Those screws are spring-tensioned, and it was difficult for me to tell when the screw had made contact and how many revolutions it had received. That was the most difficult part of the install aside from examing a dry-run set to plan fan cabling. You will not have much room to navigate tiny fan flags on the motherboard once this is in place, carefully plan ahead.Almost a month in, and this beast will run as cool as 19 C when idle and stays under 60 C when gaming. My wife plays WoW mostly, it stays under 40 C for that. This unit is also MUCH quieter than the fans on the Corsair that would regularly stay at 2400rpm I believe. The fans on the Ninja are only 800rpm or less, and while I did add two other 1300rpm fans to the case, this machine has gone from probably 50 decibels to under 30 decibels.If you have a need for tremendous heat dissipation, buy the Ninja 5. It's cheaper than a Noctura, very quiet, and does an awesome job of keeping things cool!