Appearance

The Katana II is probably one of the more compact vertically-stacked coolers that I've come across, and this is welcome. This hopefully indicates I won't have to take the motherboard out of the case to install it.

Out of the unit's base rise three individual heat pipes on either side of the unit. Fins are stacked diagonally on these pipes, giving the Katana II a unique appearance.

A 100mm fan is mounted on the higher side of the fins.

The unit's base has a mirror finish to maximize thermal transfer, and it shipped with a piece of plastic on it for protection.

Features & Specifications

I'll go over the technical specifications of the Katana II before looking at the four primary features.

Heatsink

Fan

The specifications above make room for the four defining features of the Katana II: Oval Fin Contact System (OFCS), Versatile Fan Mounting System (VFMS), Four-way Mounting, and Wide-Range RPM Cooling Optimization.

Oval Fin Contact Structure (OFCS) occurs where oval holes are put in the fins, and the fins are tilted when stacked up on the heat pipes. This creates a larger area of contact, leading to less heat transfer loss.

Versatile Fan Mounting System (VFMS) comes from one of Scythe’s popular coolers. This allows almost any size fan with a 25mm thickness to be installed with this cooler.

4-Way Mounting allows you to configure the optimized airflow direction inside your chassis, as I described in the installation section.

Wide-Range RPM Cooling Optimization simply means that the fan is capable of running at various speeds, all the way up to 1500RPM.