Verdict: Top Athlon 64 cooling, but you'll need to wear ear defenders

Apparently, a kamakiri is a type of Japanese sword, which possibly implies that this HSF can brutally slash your CPU temperatures.

With the 80mm fan spinning at its full 4,600rpm the Kamakiri outputs 46dBA of noise. Thankfully, the supplied fan controller allows to you reduce the fan speed to 1,300rpm, which lowers the noise level to 15.1dBA.

However, the Kamakiri is a superb overclocker's HSF if you can tolerate the din, and it's great for Athlon 64 CPUs. Predictably, it's much worse at the lower speed settings, particularly with a hot-running LGA775 Pentium 4e. However, it can still keep an Athlon 64 cool with the fan spinning at1,300rpm.

The LGA775 mounting mechanism is awkward, as it involves a combination of screws, washers and standoffs that fit to both sides of the motherboard before the heatsink itself can be mounted. However, on an Athlon 64 board it simply screws into two mounting holes on the standard mounting bracket.

You need to run the Kamakiri's fan at very high speeds to cool an LGA775 Pentium 4e, which makes it very noisy. However, with an Athlon 64, you can choose between low temperatures or low noise.

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