Components and Design
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The Andy Samurai Master HSF features a thin copper base capped with an extruded aluminum heatsink, six heat pipes and a large aluminum fin array cooled by a low-speed 120mm fan. The overall build quality appears to be very good.
Many current motherboard designs rely on air from the CPU heatsink fan to cool components in the main processor area. These may include the NB controller, voltage regulator modules (VRMs), and passive coolers dissipating heat from other components on the motherboard connected via heat pipes. The Asus P5N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard I use for testing is a perfect example.
Without proper cooling these motherboard components will overheat, which can lead to system instability or failure. Several of the popular high-performance CPU coolers on the market today use a tower-style design with one or more fans mounted on the side blowing air thru the heatsink, instead of down over the CPU area. This configuration can work very well for cooling the CPU, especially if the warm air exiting the CPU cooler is exhausted out the back of the enclosure via a rear case fan or power supply with a bottom intake fan. But the tower-style coolers do little to cool all the components down at the board level. And even if special cooling fans are provided by the motherboard manufacturer (to provide the needed airflow when using a CPU waterblock), the tower-style coolers are typically so big they prevent the auxiliary fans from being mounted.
Un-clipping the two fan wires, allows the fan to be lifted off, which exposes the top deck of the aluminum fins. As you can see, the tightly spaced thin fins are interleaved together. This is similar to the fin arrangement Scythe used on their Infinity HSF but the spacing is tighter on the Andy Samurai Master, which makes me question how well it will perform with minimal airflow from a low speed fan.
