With the Shuriken, Scythe's main selling point is its tiny size.

Just 64 mm high, this heatsink only weighs 355 grams, and is targeted at Home Theater PC systems that store and play multimedia content in your front room.

It has a traditional shape, with three heat pipes running to a vertical fan.

The whole thing is made of aluminum, apart from the copper heat pipes.  

Despite its diminutive size, the heatsink still packs in a 100 mm fan from PWM whose thirteen blades are nicely spaced out.

Reasonable Performance

The box proudly sports a Quad Core Ready sticker, but frankly, that's rather presumptuous and we would advise you to steer clear of this heatsink if you've a powerful quad-core processor to cool down.

The fan doesn't really get going at all until 7V, and even then struggled with our quad-core processor, and it had quite a bumpy ride with our dual-core processor too.

Upping the ante to 8.5V produced better cooling, but the performance is hardly stunning and leads to a lot more noise.

It's the ventilation system that causes most of the problems: practically absent until 7V, it makes an incredible racket when running at higher voltages.

Sometimes it's as loud as DVD being read when it's turning quickly.

In short, this heatsink will be fine for a processor that doesn't get too hot, but if you're looking to cool a quad-core, or a dual-core that pumps out a lot of heat, then you should probably look elsewhere.