Scythe Kama Angle

Even before it was delivered, this heatsink's unusual name had sparked our interest.  Once we unpacked it, we found that it was based on a tower form factor, but in the shape of a right-angle, rather than a flat vertical panel, which is certainly an unusual choice.  Scythe claims that this shape creates a more efficient airflow.

The fan, which is now at 45° to the graphics card, can more easily extract the hot air from there and redistribute towards the main fan at the back of your computer.

In technical terms, that's the only detail that sets this heatsink apart from the competition: all of the other features are fairly mainstream, with aluminum fins piled one of top of the other and supported by a set of heat pipes that begin on the base, made from nickel-plated copper.  The fan is a 120 mm PWM model with nine relatively thin blades.

The most important thing to note is that with the fan at its lowest setting, this heatsink isn't powerful enough to keep an average processor at an acceptable temperature, especially if the processor is working hard.  To be safe, you'll need to turn the fan up to at least half-speed, which shouldn't pose too much of a problem as the fan remains acceptably quiet at this setting.

Indeed, it's only when the fan is turning at full speed that it begins to become too loud. 

As a general rule, the Kama Angle works quietly to cool processors that only produce a relatively small amount of heat, and in general, dual-coreCPUs fall into this category.  For quad-cores which get hotter, the fan gets louder, but the amount of noise actually produced depends in part on your whole system.