Scythe Shuriken 2 Review

Introduction

In the SFF cooling world, the Scythe Shuriken 2 is one of the most established coolers! Let's see how well it actually performs!

What's in the Box?

Inside the tiny carton box filled with product images and short feature information, we will find the Shuriken 2 completely pre-assembled as well as the following items:

• Mounting Gear AMD/Intel
• Bag of thermal paste

Yep, the shortest item list we ever wrote.

Down below you will also find a summarized spec sheet:

Compatibility

The Scythe Shuriken 2 was definitely designed with compatibility in mind.

Due to its 92mm fan, and Scythe's exemplary keeping out of the keep-out-zone for AMD and Intel Sockets, the Scythe Shuriken 2 is 100% ram and Mainboard compatible.

For the supported Sockets, we added a full compatibility list down below:

Individual Components

Fan

Although the Scythe Shuriken 2 is basically a chunk of aluminum with a fan drilled on top, we will still look at each part individually.

The Fan used on here is one of Scythe's in-house made 92mm Kaze Flex fans spinning at 2500RPM while pushing 41CFM at 1-36mm/H2O.

While the Fan blades are painted in Scythe's signature greyish color, the frame of the fan comes in plain black.

An important thing to note here is that the overall height of the cooler can be reduced by removing the anti-vibration pads that are glued on top of the Fan.

Heatsink

With 4 copper nickel-plated heat pipes connecting the big base with the heatsink in a C-Shape bend, the whole Heatsink used on the Shuriken 2 comes in an old-styled aluminum finish. 

Appearance

If we had to summarize the Scythe Shuriken 2's design in a single word, it would probably be something between Old and 'meh'. Keeping in mind that the Shuriken 2 is already a couple of years old and that coolers at that time never came with a black heatsink, we are trying to acknowledge that, for the time, the Shuriken 2 must have been a pretty interesting and good looking cooler.

By combining Scythe's signature Greish color with a Plain Black Fan frame, the Shuriken 2 definitely stood out back in the day.

Benchmark

In order to benchmark the Scythe Shuriken 2, we needed to create an SFF specific benchmark as our usual 3900x was just too hot to be handled by coolers this size.

By using a 10700k at 1.2v 4700-AC, we benchmarked the Shuriken in both full blast and noise-to-performance

While letting the Fan spin at 100% of its max speed, the Shuriken 2 managed to keep the 10700k at 53°C, outperforming every other cooler on our list severely.

After Noise-Normalizing our results, the Shuriken 2's superiority did not budge. While it was able to keep its headstart until the very end, it was also able to do all of this while keeping the best noise-to-performance ratio present on our graph.

Truly an amazing cooler considering its miniature size.

Conclusion

Looking at the Shuriken 2's overall performance, Noise to performance as well as its compatibility with absolutely every scenario that we were able to imagine, we are absolute fans of this little monster.

While the Scythe Shuriken 2 managed to be at the top of our benchmark list, it did not brute-force its way up there but kept a surprisingly good noise-to-performance ratio all across the board.

We could go on with this section for quite some time and name everything that turned out to be surprisingly good, but considering that the only 'could have been better that we found was a potential Black Heatsink, we can only recommend this cooler for anybody who's looking for the perfect little Ultra-SFF compatible cooler without any ram restriction.