Review: Deepcool Fiend Shark

Overview

It may look like a jet turbine on top of your CPU, but can the Deepcool Fiend Shark live up to its platform cooling claims?

Right then first things first, we must be honest, we don't get the name either. But someone at Deepcool obviously has an attraction to sea life as there is a Tiger Shark and a couple of Killer Whale's in their product line-up too.

You just know by the sheer size of the box it comes in that the Fiend Shark is a bit special, but even so, its size may still surprise you, as will the care taken with the way the contents are packed.

It certainly puts most other cooler manufacturer's to shame in that respect, with its fixing components all having their own separate space in the two plastic packing trays.

It's a beast of a thing and certainly the biggest top-cooler we have seen for quite a while, and it certainly looks the part with its bright blue 140mm cooling fan and nickel plated heat-pipes and cooling fin array.

Unfortunately though, when it comes to its performance, it doesn't quite live up to that billing.

Benchmarks

To test the coolers we used an Asus P8Z68-V motherboard and an Intel i7 2600K which we overclocked to 4.6GHz for overclocked part of the testing.

To stress the CPU we ran the Small FFT's test of Prime95 for 20 minutes using the RealTemp utility to measure the core temperature's, averaging out the temperature for all the cores.

Standard clock performance

Overclocking performance

Peak to idle performance

Verdict

Despite the enormity of the cooler, the Fiend Shark is surprisingly easy to install and the clear instructions help with this.

Unusually instead of the usual tiny screws to fix the mounting brackets to the heatsink there are just two hefty thumbscrews, one each side to do the job.

It can though prove a little tricky to get started if you aren't blessed with thin fingers...

In the marketing spiel for the Fiend Shark you might notice it claims to be able to cool the surrounding motherboard components down. But don't be overly sucked in by all this, as all top flow chillers cool surrounding areas to a certain extent.

Because of its sheer height of the device (131mm), and its 140mm cooling fan, it is a little more effective and noticeable than most. Or to put it another way, if you put your hand under the cooling fin array you can certainly feel the draught, but only when the fan is being seriously pushed.

Under normal conditions the slightly tweaked UBF140 fan is pretty dammed quiet, with a quoted noise level of just 18.2dBA 700rpm, which rises to a much more audible 32dBA at 1400rpm when it is shifting an impressive 80cm3 of airflow.

When it comes to performance though the Fiend Shark, despite its size and comparatively huge 140mm fan, is a bit disappointing.

This is especially true when it's compared to the tower coolers we've recently reviewed. But then most top fan coolers do seem to lack a little when compared to their tower brethren.

Adding to the problem with the Fiend Shark is the price tag, which makes you feel that it really should be performing better than it does.

We liked:

The Fiend Shark certainly looks the part and its installation should be a lesson to all those cooler manufacturers who seem to revel in making fitting a CPU cooler to a motherboard as complicated and as tortuous as possible.

It's also tall enough to allow the fitting of some fairly hefty heatsink equipped memory modules into the DIMM slots.

We Disliked:

It has to be said that given its size we were hoping for more from the Fiend Shark, yes it's quiet at stock speeds but then if you want a quiet cooler there are plenty around for a lot less money.

Given its size it looks like a cooler aimed at overclockers, but given our test results if you are looking for air cooling for some pretty extreme overclocking your probably better off looking elsewhere.

Final word:

Looks impressive but unfortunately suffers, like most top-coolers do, in comparison with their tower cooling competitor's.

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