Scythe Is Moving to Taiwan and, Somehow, Building Its First Liquid Cooler
Scythe's European branch is in insolvency proceedings, its operations are consolidating in Taiwan, and the same trade show where that news landed featured a mockup of the company's first liquid cooler. Those facts belong in one sentence, because they describe a company shrinking its footprint to protect a brand identity built almost entirely on air cooling. The cooler is going by the working name Scycopter, and the engineering behind it is a sight more interesting than the pun.
A small vendor entering a mature category late usually does it badly, with a rebadged pump from whichever supplier will take the order. What Scythe showed instead was a design study with a lead designer's fingerprints on it, plus a set of air coolers that carry the same habits. Reading the whole booth together tells you more than any single product does.
What the Insolvency News Actually Says
The reporting that made the rounds was about insolvency proceedings in Europe, and the obvious read is that a beloved cooler brand is circling the drain. Scythe's own account is narrower: restructuring, with operations moving to Taiwan, and European customers still served by shipping and sales. That is a footprint decision rather than an exit, and it is the kind of decision a component maker makes when warehouse and compliance costs in one region outrun the margin on a $50 heatsink.
It is worth being precise about what that means for buyers. Nothing about the coolers changes on day one. What changes is support geography and, over time, the price of getting a replacement fan mount in Frankfurt rather than Taipei. For a company whose reputation rests on parts that quietly work for a decade, service reach is part of the product.
Scycopter: A Year of Study and a 0.1mm Fin Pitch
By Scythe's account, Kitagawa-san, the lead designer, spent roughly a year studying liquid coolers before drawing one. The result is a mockup rather than a shipping product, and the radiator thickness is a conventional 27mm with a caveat that it could still change. Conventional is the right starting point for a first attempt; the interesting numbers are inside the block.
The fin pitch is 0.1mm, which is tight enough that manufacturing tolerance becomes the design problem, and the copper cold plate is 1.6mm in total height. Tight fin spacing buys surface area and pays for it in pressure drop, which is the sort of trade a company known for high-static-pressure fans would make on purpose. The pump block also carries an option to bolt a fan on top, blowing down across the memory and VRM.
Then there is the peg. A 3D-printed stalk with tape underneath lets you stick a fan to almost any flat surface and angle it wherever the heat is — VRM, memory, an M.2 shield. It is a two-dollar part that solves a problem people currently solve with zip ties and double-sided tape, and it is the most Scythe thing at the show: unglamorous, cheap, and obviously the product of somebody who has built a PC recently.
Magoruku: Six Heatpipes for $50, Maybe $44
The Magoruku has been doing the trade-show circuit for a year and is finally close to shelves. Scythe puts it at $50, with a suggestion that US pricing could land nearer $44 depending on market conditions — a $6 swing that says more about tariff and freight math than about the cooler.
The specification is unapologetically mid-range: a flat nickel-plated copper cold plate, six 6mm heatpipes, and two 120mm Wonder Tornado fans at 25mm thick. The fan height adjusts on metal brackets rather than plastic clips, which matters more than it sounds, because plastic clips are the part that snaps on the third rebuild and metal ones are the part that does not.
Scythe's positioning is a high-performing budget tower, which is a crowded sentence in 2025. At $44 to $50 it does not need to beat a Peerless Assassin to be worth buying; it needs to be quiet enough at 25 dBA, clear the memory and arrive with a mount that does not flex. The metal brackets are a decent signal that someone thought about the third rebuild rather than the first boot.
Big Shuriken 4, the Mugen TUF, and a Colour Decision
The Big Shuriken 4 is nearly final, and its distinguishing feature is a set of cut-outs along the fan frame sides that let air escape rather than stall against the rim. In a low-profile cooler, where the fan sits millimetres from a motherboard, that is a real fix for a real problem: the frame is the obstruction. What is not decided is whether the retail version ships all-black or with ARGB, which is a strange thing to leave open this late.
Scythe's Mugen 6 in TUF colours is a rebadge of an existing tower, and it exists for the same reason every co-branded cooler exists: the TUF badge sells boards and the cooler rides along. There is nothing wrong with that. It does mean the interesting engineering at this booth was all in the two products that are not co-branded.
What I Think
A first liquid cooler from Scythe is a bet against the company's own strengths, and I am not convinced it is the bet it needs to make. Air cooling is where Scythe's reputation lives, the Magoruku and the Shuriken are both credible, and the AIO category is a supply-chain business where a pump platform you did not design decides whether your product is good in year four. A 0.1mm fin pitch and a 1.6mm cold plate suggest the company understands the physics. The physics is not the hard part.
What I would actually ask for is the peg, sold in a five-pack for the price of a coffee, and a Magoruku at $44 with a mount that does not need a second pair of hands. The restructuring is a warning, not a verdict: Scythe has spent years being the quiet, slightly expensive option that outlives the build it went into, and that is a much better business than chasing a $190 AIO against four companies with deeper supply chains. Ship the air coolers, keep the spares channel alive in Europe, and let the Scycopter stay a mockup until it has a reason to exist.