Minus one fan makes the Assassin 4S 20 EUR cheaper than the Assassin IV it’s based on. The heatsink seems to be the same, and the only difference is the number of fans – one instead of two. The cooling performance will most certainly be lower, but we expect that its drop won’t be as significant as the amount of money that you can save with this cheaper model. In addition, there’s also wider compatibility.
Last year DeepCool came up with a rather unconventional, but extremely effective cooler, the Assassin IV. We mention it in the introduction because it became the basis for the new DeepCool Assassin 4S cooler.
The main (and design-wise, the only?) difference compared to the Assassin IV is that Assassin 4S has no rear fan and the heatsink is cooled by only one fan placed between two bundles of aluminum fins. By analogy, this is a similar situation to the Noctua NH-D15 and NH-D15S (single-fan) coolers, for example. However, unlike these coolers (Noctua, where the NH-D15S also has a diverted heatsinik away from the PCI Express slots, as opposed to the NH-D15), the heatsinks of the DeepCool coolers are identical. At least based on external features. We can’t see the heatpipes inside.
The dimensions of the Assassin 4S cooler are 164 mm (height) × 144 mm (width) × 116 mm (depth).
Assassin 4S compared to Assassin IV does not have a fan on the exhaust, with DeepCool’s positioning of it changing the previous conventions a bit, where the second fan on dual-tower coolers was always in the front. However, the move was not a step into the void, as even in competition from coolers such as the BeQuiet! Dark Rock Elite or the Cooler Master MA824 Stealth, the Assassin IV, in terms of efficiency, is a slightly higher ranked cooler at lower speeds in a higher thermal load. Or rather, it has higher cooling performance per unit of noise , at least on the Intel LGA 1200 platform.
We expect the Assassin 4S to lose that dominant position, but again it will be “the cheaper option” compared to competing coolers, with probably a more attractive price/performance ratio. This will eventually show in tests, we already have a sample of this cooler in our testlab.
The advantage of the Assassin 4S could also eventually lie in better compatibility with motherboards, where the rear fan will never interfere with the I/O connector cover. And it also avoids DIMM slots, which are on motherboards from the left of the socket (the right side is already avoided by the Assassin IV as one of the few dual-tower coolers). In practice, however, this is rather a theoretical situation, as AMD sTR(X) platforms are unsupported and Intel LGA 20xx, which also have memory slots on both sides of the processor socket, are no longer sold. Of the mainstream platforms, all current (AMD AM5 and Intel LGA 1700) and older (AMD AM4, Intel LGA 1200 and Intel LGA 115x) platforms are supported.
The base of the cooler is symmetrical and seven heatpipes with a diameter of 6 mm pass through it. These dissipate waste heat into two finned towers, which are cooled by a 140mm fan with a speed range of 500–1800rpm. This can be manually narrowed if required (to reduce the maximum speed) by a physical switch located in the corner of the cooler (easily accessible from the top).
The DeepCool Assassin 4S is available from today (March 19, 2024) for a suggested price of 90 EUR. In both black and all-white (WH) variants.
English translation and edit by Jozef Dudáš
There was an error in the original text of the report, which stated that Assassin 4S used the same 140 mm fan (DFr140) as the Assassin IV. In fact, these coolers use different fans, the model on the Assassin 4S has two blades less, 7 in total (instead of the 9 blades of the model on the Assassin IV). DeepCool may have done so in response to the rather frequent complaints about the sound of the DFr140? How the heatsink will react to the use of a different model can be seen from our spectral analyses. All the more interesting comparison it will be. The Assassin IV with one fan is not equal to the Assassin 4S, although the heatsink designs are obviously the same.