Performance
Performance of the Scythe Kotetsu cooler has been tested on a pretty popular gaming setup. The i7-9700K processor heats up less than the i9-9900K while provides not a much worse performance in games. It’s also much cheaper. For the comparison, we’ve set the CPU at 5GHz and 1.30V. Under load, the voltage was a bit lower.
All tests were performed on an open test rig. The ambient temperature was about 24-25°C so quite high for a room.
Our comparison includes three tests. The idle mode is a PC left without any load besides standard Windows services running in the background. The mixed mode base on a PCMark 10 extended test which uses popular applications and simple games. The max load is a CPU+FPU AIDA64 stability test. Shows about maximum CPU load during the most demanding work on all CPU cores.
I wasn’t expecting that the Kotetsu will beat some of the best coolers in our comparison, but I won’t hide that I was expecting it will perform better. Once we run a stability test which uses AVX2 instructions, then we can see that the CPU reaches 100°C. In tests with a mixed test pattern, the temperature is above 90°C but is still a couple of degrees below the throttling point. The performance, in general, is close to that of some other popular coolers made in a single tower design with a single fan like CoolerMaster Hyper 212.
The generated noise has been measured about 1m from the test rig. While idle, ambient noise was louder than the cooler’s fan. It was spinning at about 200-400 RPM as we can see in the specification. Under load, it was balancing between 700-1200 RPM. The fan was really quiet, to the point that results of whole PC were mostly based on additional devices and the graphics card. Final noise was measured under full PC load was about 34dB while typical noise while playing games was closer to 31dB.
