Scythe is a Japanese heatsink brand whose products we’ve usually looked forward to reviewing. Not only are their heatsinks ambitious, creative and unusual, the guys behind the brand seemed to be having a lot of fun with simple things like Japanese names for their models: Kamakiri (Scythe Sword), Kamaboko (Scythe Halberd / fish cake), Kamakaze (Scythe Wind), Katana (Japanese longsword) and so on.

After the Scythe Ninja became the King Kong of the high performance, low airflow, low noise CPU coolers, Scythe introduced the Mine (pronounced mee-né, Summit), the Samurai, the Infinity, and now, the Andy Samurai Master. The Scythe web site conjures up the phrase, "Where East meets West!" in its description of this model. How a heatsink is East or West, we can only conjecture; we suspect this reference is only about the name.

According to Devon, who is something of an afficionado of Japanese anime films, Andy Samurai Master is a brash, young western samurai character. That’s about all Devon can remember, but it’s enough to explain the retail box, which is visually one of the loudest ever to arrive at SPCR.

In any case, the Andy is a bit of a departure from most of Scythe’s big heasinks in the last two years. It is designed for straight-down fan airflow, rather than the parallel-to-motherboard airflow of the tower designs like the Infinity, Ninja, Katana, or the even earlier FCS-50 and NCU-1000/2000. ...