DeepCool Assassin 4S – The stealthy tamer of high temps

Key features

A year ago, the excellent DeepCool Assassin IV cooler was tested here and eventually took our top award. Today we take a closer look at a modified version of this cooler called Assassin 4S. This variant may have lost the rear fan, but the middle one has been completely redesigned to compensate for this loss. So today’s article logically aims to find out how much of an impact this major change has on efficiency and acoustics.

Build, design and key features

At first glance, you might think that someone simply took the original Assassin IV cooler and just took the frame with the rear fan. To some extent you would be right, at least in terms of design. The rear face of the cooler even still has holes for mounting the 120mm fan frame, but you’ll look in vain for one in the cooler’s package. Thanks to this change, however, the shape of the cooler has become almost symmetrical. Thus, the Assassin 4S looks like a minimalist black cube with futuristic elements, typical of DeepCool’s coolers in recent years. But as they say, the devil is in the details. In this case, it’s hidden in the fan used, which is housed under a perforated cover in the middle of the cooler.

   

The design of the passive part of the Assassin 4S cooler is identical to its older relative Assassin IV and is therefore made up of two dense bundles of aluminum fins connected by seven six-millimeter copper heatpipes. You may think that the two cooler towers are equally thick, but this is just an optical illusion due to the position of the perforated cover in the center of the cooler. The rear tower is about a third thicker than the front one, which is a more advantageous arrangement in a single fan configuration.

The whole cooler is in black-gray tones except for the coldplate of the base. In addition, DeepCool offers a white variant of this cooler with the Assassin 4S WH designation. So if you’re styling your build in light colors, this white option shouldn’t escape your attention.

   

The top surface is as inconspicuous as the rest of the cooler and you will find only a small switch to limit the maximum fan speed (by about 20%) and an unobtrusive manufacturer’s logo that changes the intensity of its backlight according to the selected speed range. Unfortunately, however, it is not possible to change its color, so the logo only glows in a shade of green-blue – see the initial photo of the article. The perforated part of the top cover is held onto the cooler by small magnets and hides the 140mm fan underneath, once removed from the cooler you reveal access to a metal partition with a pair of mounting system screws, which are fitted with springs to achieve optimal pressure of the cooler on the CPU’s heat spreader.

   

In the photos below I have prepared a small visual comparison of the Assassin IV (left) and Assassin 4S (right) coolers. You can compare the difference in geometry and number of blades of the middle fan and also verify that both coolers are practically identical in terms of design, if we ignore the presence of the frame with the second fan in the older model of the cooler.

   

The contents of the DeepCool Assassin 4S cooler package are pretty standard and there is nothing major missing. The mounting system is practically all metal and robust enough considering the overall weight and dimensions of the cooler. You’ll also find a rather generous portion of DM9 thermal paste as well as a plastic squeegee for its application. Personally, I never made use of this aid, the pressure exerted on the processor by my sample cooler was exceedingly even, but some may find the piece of plastic useful.

   

Thanks to the simple mounting system, the installation of the cooler is straightforward and without major obstacles. Since you have to tighten a pair of spring-loaded screws at the very heart of the cooler, you’ll appreciate the included screwdriver. The user manual is well laid out and any user with a modicum of manual dexterity should be able to install the cooler by following it.

Cooler and fan parameters

The DeepCool Assassin 4S is a cooler with a small paradox in terms of its dimensions. It does not encroach on the space of the DIMM slots for memory or interfere with the passive coolers of the CPU power delivery, but it is still a remarkably tall cooler with a height of over 160 mm and a weight of almost one and a half kilograms. A price tag of under 90 EUR and a six-year warranty on the entire cooler is nonetheless a very interesting combination, though of course it’s still not a cheap product. But if the assumption of similar efficiency to the Assassin IV is confirmed, we will get a very interesting price vs. efficiency ratio with the Assassin 4S.

I don’t know if DeepCool has an error on their website, but the paper specs of the new fan for the Assassin 4S cooler are suspiciously identical to the original 140mm fan from the Assassin IV cooler. However, we all know very well here that paper never refused ink, and real measurements and stress tests are more important, which is of course the main goal of this article.

• Contents
• Key features
• Measurement methodology
• Results – 39 dBA
• Results – 42 dBA
• Results – 45 dBA
• Results – 48 dBA
• Results – maximum speed
• Spectral analysis of noise
• Conclusion and evaluation

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