Review of the Raijintek Themis Evo CPU Heatsink

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So you finally received that brand new CPU you have always wanted and you open it up and taking up 90% of the box is the CPU fan. While it works, that is usually not the CPU fan you want to stay with. The included fans are either too loud or amazingly ineffective, so you have to quickly do some research and find your new fan, hopefully I can help you here.

Today I will be reviewing the Raijintek Themis Evo, does it have what it takes to earn its spot on top of your CPU? Let’s find out, let’s start off with the specifications.

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Specifications and Features

  • 4 Heatpipes with CPU Direct Contact (C.D.C.)
  • Fin Material: Aluminum Alloy and Nickel
  • Thermal Resistance: 0.11 °C/W
  • Included Fan Size: 120MM
  • Dimension: W 120mm, H 120mm, D 25mm
  • Bearing Type: Sleeve
  • Noise Level 24.53 dBA Max
  • Air Flow: 43.8 ~ 65.68 CFM
  • Life Expectancy: 40,000 hours
  • Connector 4 Pin PWM
  • Socket Compatibility:
    • AMD: FM1, FM2, FM2+ AM2,AM2+, AM3, AM3+
    • Intel: LGA 775, 1150, 1155, 1156, 1366, 2011 Core i3, i5 and i7’s

Well, AMD or Intel, you would be safe with this one, now let’s see how it looks like with an unboxing.

Looks pretty nice and pretty big too, but the good ones always are.

So as you already saw in the unboxing, here is everything that comes in the box.

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In one of the 2 baggies, you will find the back plate, AMD/Intel mounting clips, Crossbar and thermal grease.

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And in the second baggy you find all of the bits, rubbers, screws, nuts (This is for the computer right?). I won’t get into too much detail here and what all of these bits do; I will show you during the installation.

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So one of the first things I noticed researching this is that it works with just about every CPU, both AMD and Intel alike so that’s already a good thing in my book. I will show you how that works out by going through and install.

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I circled the AMD holes in red for their colors and Intel blue for their colors, just to show you how the back plate lines up to hold your CPU in place.

This is how it looks like already attached on my motherboard, the Asus Z87 Sabertooth, an Intel based board.

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The knurled thread screws you see already holding this backplate in place are these guys, included in the huge bag of screws this packages comes with.

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So after all 4 screws are in place, you will need the plastic nuts to fasten the back plate onto the motherboard. This is how they will look like (at least 2 of them) fastened holding the screws in place,

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When that part is done, you will now install the mounting clips. They will look relatively the same, though once the plastic nuts with the screws are in place it will be evident how they slide in, aside from the fact that they are clearly labelled Intel and AMD.

Here is the AMD mounting clips

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And the Intel mounting clips

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Once those have been slide into place, they you will need the metal nuts to fasten them to the knurled threaded screws. Once installed, they will look like this with the mounting clips and metal nuts. This package seems to include a lot of nuts.

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The next step is to put some thermal paste on the CPU. The paste included in this package is equivalent to Dow Corning TC-5121, so you might not need to buy additional thermal paste.

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In this picture, I ended up using too much, but I did get rid of a bit.

Before I install it though, let me show off the heatsink itself.

You can see from the bottom the 4 heat pipes coming down to the nickel plated CPU Direct Contact (C.D.C.) helping to keep things extra cool.

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Standing up, it’s a tall 6.50 inches, 4.80 inches wide and 3.23 inches deep.

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As you probably would have expected, the heat pipes come all the way to the top of the fan, adding to its nice design, but the fins also get a little design and even the company logo.

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Afterwards, I put the heatsink on and screwed it in.

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While pictures are great and they help, I think this might be a time for a video. Check out this video on how to install the Raijintek Themis Evo

She does look nice in my system,

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It does look nice in my system and the red just helps it stand out a bit too, sometimes you need a little contrast.

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The housing of the fan is red, but the fins are white, so it actually helps to reflect the lighting in the case, almost making it look like the fins were lit too.

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Enough about the looks, what we all want to know is how it performs, well luckily for you I have those numbers here.

First off, here is my test system

For testing I will test to see how this heatsink cools after 15 minutes of the computer being idle. Afterwards I test running Cinebench to gauge performance and how hot the CPU gets and finally I will run a stress test for 15 minutes on Aida64 Extreme and report on how hot the CPU gets.

I use HWMonitor to see how high and low the CPU temperatures have gotten and CPU-Z to see how the CPU is clocking. If an Intel CPU gets to 100°C, it will throttle itself down to protect itself from getting damaged. It will continue trying to raise itself back to its full clock speed but if the heat is still up there it will quickly come back down.

So let’s start testing

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After the machine sitting idle for 15 minutes, aside from the background processes programs such as NVIDIA’s Geforce Experience, Panda Anti-Virus, Samsung Magician, Logitech Gaming Software (mouse driver software), and Realtek’s Audio Manager. I have these installed not only because this is my main computer and they are all already installed but to also simulate a real world environment.

The lowest temperature the Raijintek Themis Evo reached was 29°C and the highest was 52°C. I don’t gauge it by the current temperature because that temperature fluctuates very rapidly. As you can see I circled the package temperatures of the CPU as this will represent the highest/lowest temperatures the entire CPU has reach, I do not gauge it by each individual core.

Let’s see what Cinebench tells us.

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The Cinebench score was a decent 878cb. The CPU portion will only stress the CPU, a great test that only takes about a minute, and while it is not the end solution for stress testing a CPU, it does catch many problems with a CPU overclock much quicker than most programs. It is also a great program to be able to compare and contrast performance from PC to PC, overall performance and how well an overclock performs.

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We can see here from the HWMonitor reading shows that the lowest temperature during testing was 37°C and the hottest was 75°C.

 

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Here you can see, the CPU was at 100% running for 18 minutes and 27 seconds. I like to usually do 15 minutes but I am not just going to stand around and watch, mostly will be anyway between 15 minutes and 40 minutes, but all over 15. This means there will be some more testing here so stay tuned.

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Here we can see that the temperature the package was at when the testing started was 37° but during testing peaked at 94°C. Nothing that all other cores are in the 80’s or below, but there will always be that one core. During those 15 minutes, the CPU never throttled. You can see in the Aida temperature readings that they were all over the charts.

The 4790K is a very hot CPU as you can see but if you look at the Aida64, you can see that the 94°C might have just been a quick blip. I will do some more testing this and report below.

The other testing will be with the Core i7 4790K overclocked to 4.6Ghz, only 200Mhz over the stock Turbo frequency of 4.4Ghz but 600Mhz over the Base frequency of 4Ghz. So let’s get into that.

Overlocked to 4.6Ghz the lowest temperature the Raijintek Themis Evo reached was 30°C and the highest was 47°C. Again, the initial testing is done with the PC freshly booted into Windows 10 sitting idle for 15 minutes.

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That’s not too far off from stock temperatures but remember, the processor is not always sitting at 4.6Ghz, I have it set to when its not in use it will drop to 5% it speed. You can set this as well in Windows Power Options. My Power options are “High Performance” which would normally keep the CPU at 100% speeds, wasting power, generating needless heat and killing my CPU a little bit quicker.

If you want this set, go into the Power options in the Control Panel, click “Change plan settings” then again click “Change advanced power settings” and scroll down to “Processor power management”. Click to expand “Processor Power Management” and click to expand “Minimum Processor state” and you can set the percentage to whatever you would like, I set mine to have. When complete, click Apply and OK and you are good to go.

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This does not affect performance at all, the speed ramps up in a fraction of a second. I will mention that I also had this setting enabled when I did the stock testing as well.   Cinebench is next.

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Definitely improved performance at a score of 922cb over the prior stock scores of 878cb.

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We can see below that during this test the temperatures peaked at 78°C, which of course means there was no throttling. Odd, I remember it being 94°C when it was stock, this is overclocked to 4.6Ghz, it should be hotter.

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Well, let’s see what Aida64 says.

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As we saw before, CPU usage at 100%, not once did it throttle and I went much longer than 15 minutes, I got caught up playing a game, not on this computer though of course. Here is a HWMonitor reading during the test

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I can’t explain it, but the max temperature was actually 1 degree cooler with it overclocked. I took a larger screenshot here so you could see that it was actually overclocked.

So it looks like this heatsink does a pretty good job, but to help you have some sort of comparison I performed the same tests using the Arctic Cooler Freezer 7 Rev 2 and the stock heatsink that came in the box with the Intel Core i7 4790K processor. Maybe one of these 2 does better that the Raijintek Themis Evo?

This graph shows you the differences in idle temperatures. Raijintek took the lead by as much as 11°C degrees, that’s pretty nice. These are all at stock speeds.

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Let’s see how the temps look like in Cinebench,

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Wow, remember, these are stock speeds right now on the fan that is included in the box. The CPU throttled so much it went down to 3.9Ghz, that’s 100Mhz lower than base clock, that’s pretty bad. The Raijintek Themis Evo cools 16°C better than the standard Intel heatsink and 7°C better than the Arctic Freezer 7 Rev2 Pro.

Cinebench Scores:

Even though the Raijintek Themis Evo ran cooler, it seemed to have scored a little lower in the benchmark than the Freezer 7 Rev 2 Pro.

OK, now let’s check out Aida64 Extreme performance.

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Unfortunately this is the benchmark result that I think might have somewhat gone awry but I will never lie in a review. The Arctic Freezer 7 Rev2 Pro scored 3°C better than the Raijintek Themis Evo and well, the Intel standard heatsink failed miserably again. I mean, it’s good that they included a heatsink to save people a few dollars when buy a CPU, but it’s pretty bad when a stock CPU hit 100° on a benchmark in a very well ventilated case, it doesn’t make sense.

Ok, so now that the stock speeds have been presented, let’s get to what everyone wants, the overclocked performance. Even if you don’t overclock, a heatsink that performs well in an overclocked situation will perform that much better in a stock scenario.

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Unsurprising the Intel came up with the highest temperature here at 44°C. The Arctic Freezer 7 Rev2 Pro came it at a decent 39° but the Raijintek destroyed it with 31°C, a 13°C improvement over the Standard Intel Heatsink and an 8°C improvement over the Freezer 7.

Ok, so now on to Cinebench.

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Now here I expected there to be a low score, but not a failure. No matter how many voltages I changed, I could not hit a 4.6Ghz clock with the stock heatsink. Usually it would work just throttle but the minute I would start up Cinebench it would just continue to fail, any voltage I would change would not work. The 4.6Ghz overclock was saved in a profile as was the stock so for each test I would load and save a profile, the stock heatsink wanted no part of this.

So that leaves it to the big 2, Arctic and Raijintek. The Arctic Freezer 7 Rev2 Pro tried hard but it was no match to the Raijintek Themis Evo coming in at 77°C, 6°C cooler than the Freezer 7.

Cinebench Scores:

Let’s see what Aida64 Extreme tells us, this would be the decider.

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Since the previous failed, I was not about to even try here, so let’s pretend like the Stock Intel heatsink fan is not even there. While the Arctic Freezer 7 Rev 2 Pro tried hard, the Raijintek Themis Evo came in at 93°C, 2°C lower than the Freezer 7, so it is yet another win for the Raijintek Themis Evo.

So I think it goes without saying that the Raijintek Themis Evo is a great fan and while it did come up on top in all graphs except one it can actually get better. While it only comes with 4 nipples (it actually came with 5, but I think it was mispackaged) , it comes with a retention mechanism for another fan, so you can have a push pull effect with this heatsink for improved cooling. I had asked for them to include one in the package so that I could include in the review, but it looks like they forgot, it would be great to test a dual fan configuration.

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So there you have it, I think we can all agree that this is a great heatsink at an amazing price also. I really don’t want to give it a 5 because I really hate the heatsinks that in order to install, you have to remove the motherboard. If you have the right case like I do, or did a good job wiring its super simple but to get a good one, you will need to strap it on to the board real good and I will say, this is a great one at a great price. I would recommend spending a few dollars more and getting a second fan.

dbeditorschoice

No cons on this, it get’s a 5 out of 5.

We are influencers and brand affiliates.  This post contains affiliate links, most which go to Amazon and are Geo-Affiliate links to nearest Amazon store.