Design and Functionality

New cooler measures 145x149x106 mm and weighs 715 g. just like its predecessor, Zipang 2 is a top cooler with the airflow directed towards the PCB surface and consists of six copper heatpipes 6 mm in diameter, aluminum heatsink arrays, small additional heatsink and a 140 mm fan:

All heatpipes come out of the same side of the cooler base, twist in a sophisticated curve and pierce aluminum heatsink plates. The fan covers most of the heatsink top and directs the airflow between the plates:

As I have already said above, the heatsink consists of six arrays that are all connected with small bridges adding sturdiness to the whole thing.

According to Scythe, multiple heatsink arrays like that are called M.A.P.S. (Multiple Pass-Through Airflow Structure). This structure reduces the airflow resistance and stimulates fast heat transfer from the parts of the heatsink closest to the heatpipes, which improves overall cooling efficiency of each heatsink array and the cooler as a whole.

Each heatsink array consists of 68 aluminum plates, each 0.35 mm thick that are spaced out at 2 mm from one another:

Two heatsink arrays on the sides are 23 mm wide, and the four in the middle – 21 mm wide. All plates are of the same height, which makes 35 mm. The calculated effective heatsink surface of Zipang 2 cooler (without the lower additional heatsink) makes 5,890 cm², which is 7.7% smaller than that of Kabuto (6,380 cm²).

Look at the way the heatpipes are laid out inside the heatsink:

In my opinion, this is not the best way to do it. Two central heatpipes that bear the maximum thermal load (which you can check simply by touch) are right beneath the fan rotor, which is 49 mm in diameter. So, part of two heatsink arrays that are right beneath the fan rotor won’t be cooled as efficiently as the next two arrays located in better ventilated zones. They should have directed the two central heatpipes coming out of the cooler base to these particular arrays, the second and the fifth from the left (as shown on the left photograph above), because this way the hottest heatpipes and heatsink plates would have been cooled best of all.

Another drawback about Scythe Zipang 2 cooler, in my opinion, is excessive curving of the heatpipes on the way from the base to the heatsink:

The reasons behind that are absolutely clear: they wanted to make sure that the cooler heatpipes wouldn’t interfere with tall heatsinks on the chipset and mainboard voltage regulator components during Zipan 2 installation. However, I think Scythe engineers decided to play it way too safe, because if these heatpipes were leading straight to the heatsink without any additional curving along the way, they would still create no obstacle. I specifically checked if this supposition was correct on three different mainboards, and on none of them the virtual path of the heatpipes going straight interfered with the mainboard heatsinks. At the same time, we can’t deny the fact that heat flows quicker along straight heatpipes rather than curved ones, which means that straight heatpipes have higher heat transfer rate. It is a pity that Scythe Zipang 2 lost a bit of the cooling efficiency here. In conclusion I have to say that the heatpipes are soldered to a copper nickel-plated base plate, which is 1.9 mm thick.

The base of Zipang 2 cooler is extremely even:

The finish quality is also excellent:

The thermal compound imprint on the CPU heat-spreader turned out very good:

Now let’s take a look at the fan:

This is the good old buddy Scythe Kaze Maru, 140x140x25 mm in size with 11 blades. This fan model is called SY1425SL12ML and is based on a slide bearing with claimed MTBF of 30,000 hours. It rotates with constant speed of 1,000 RPM. According to the specs, at this rotation speed the fan should create 51.43 CFM airflow and generate no more than 22.74 dBA of noise. The static pressure is not mentioned in the fan specs. The maximum power consumption shouldn’t exceed 1.5 W.

The fan is attached firmly to the heatsink using two wire clips that catch on to the fan loops with one end and go into special heatsink grooves with another:

Since these retention “loops” on Scythe Kaze Maru fan are at the same distance from one another as the loops on the regular 120 mm fans, you can easily replace the default fan with an alternative 120 mm fan using the same wire clips.

In conclusion I would like to offer you three photos comparing the heatsinks of Scythe Kabuto and Zipang 2 side by side: