Page 5

Performance
 
Lets see now how the cooler performs in terms of heat dissipation. As stated earlier this puppy can work both with or without the fan and become fully passive. A word of caution though: To be on the safe side when no fan is used, make sure that your case has good and proper ventilation. Case ventilation is supposed to work this way: The air flow will be coming from the front of your case, passing over the CPU, and then being sucked out with the help of the rear case fans, and the fan in the power supply unit. Only with enough airflow can the Ninja get rid of it's heat.
 
While disabling that airflow and using another test system then you see in the photo's. Hilbert's main testing platform based on a AMD64 FX-57, the temp jumped up to 78c under full load when used with no fan, and 64c when idle. So, using this heatsink passively is not recommended if you have a CPU that produces a lot of heat, or if your case is not well ventilated. It really needs some fans next to it to push the air out of the case (talking about the case fans that are on the rear and front).
 
On to the active cooling then as this is how most of the users will use it, and this is also the way Guru3D.com would recommend you to use this kit.

54 Degrees C at 100% load on an AMD64 Athlon FX-57 processor. That's not bad considering this is the quietest fan ever. Hilbert measured less than 37 DBa with the fan active yet there was a lot of background noise (thus not coming from the fan). At idle the top temperature was 37 Degrees C, and the temps were measured at an ambient room temp of 21 ~ 22c.

For a comparison, the Zalmans Resonator water cooling kit did 41c on idle and 54c at 100% load. So it's suffice to say that the ninja delivers as promised. Very decent cooling with and absolutely lovely noise level.

The Verdict.
 
So let's quickly talk about the pros and cons. What do we think about that Ninja? To be honest, I kind of actually like it. Its light, can cool your CPU quite well, and it is not noisy at all. But unfortunately, not everything is peachy. (Haha, I used peachy). Two small downsides. It really is a tight fit in the case so you need to make sure you have plenty of room to work with. Secondly the fan mounting mechanism, while works fine, it could use some improvement.

Other than that there's nothing much to say other than it's a fantastic looking cooler. It works really well and of course stays well below annoying sound levels as we are talking in the region of 30 dba, you simply will not hear that fan.

Two thumbs up towards Scythe for bringing this product to the market. Well done and we hope to see much more from them.

• Pros: 
  -Sufficient cooling of the CPU.
  -Very silent operation.
   
• Cons:
  -Size. (Forget using it if you have a small form factor PC or if you have a small case that has the power supply unit over the CPU).
  -Fan mounting mechanism. Not really a bad point, but it could use a bit of improvement as it is only being supported by the lower most and upper most fins of the heatsink.

Highly recommended.

Manufacturer: Scythe Co., Ltd. Japan (scythe-eu.com)
Product: Ninja Plus (120mm fan included) (Product code: SCNJ-1000P)

One last glimpse.