The Scythe Kama Bay 5.25″ system cooling fan can be fitted where ever you have 3 free 5.25″ bays as an additional system intake fan.

Background

My Coolermaster case like many other cases on the market has a 120mm exhaust fan at the rear just behind the cpu socket at the top of the case and an 120mm intake fan at the bottom in the front of the case. This means that air supplied to the cpu fan comes in at the bottom usually cooling the hard drives and then has to find it’s way up to the cpu fan before being exhausted by the rear fan.

The Akasa Evo 120 that I have installed on the CPU has a fan mounted in the same plane as the rear case fan, so it blows directly into the exhaust. What I decided might be a good idea was to fit a second intake fan that would also be in that same plane and at the same level as the cpu fan. This fan would be mounted in the 5.25″ bays and would hopefully provide cooler air more directly for the cpu than that of the current intake. I looked around for such a fan and found that the Scythe Kama Bay fan was the only option.

Scythe are quite well known for their CPU coolers so I was fairly confident in buying this product even though I have had no previous experience of Scythe products myself. The Kama bay fan is a standard 120mm x 25mm case fan mounted in a bracket that can fit in the 5.25″ bays of any PC case in one of three ways. It either fits in an upright position and takes up three bays blowing into the case through it’s own intake mesh or it fits laying down and either blows air upwards or downwards for drive cooling purposes. My review is only interested in the first fitting option for use as an additional intake fan.

What you get

Scythe have packaged the Kama Bay in a sturdy cardboard container that has a plastic window in the front, this is in my opinion a nice change from all those products that come in moulded plastic that’s so difficult to get into and have to be destroyed to get them open. Open up the box and you’ll find all that you could possible need including fan screws.

The fan provided is a Scythe 120mm fan with a rated speed of 800rpm from a 12V input. It is connected by a standard motherboard style 3 pin connector and a 3 pin to molex 4 pin adapter is provided too. The molex adapter includes a pass through connection for the rpm read back for connecting to a motherboard header which is a nice touch. Unfortunately this fan wasn’t suited to my needs as I was wanting a faster fan and preferably one with blue LEDs, so I have chosen to swap the fan for a Hiper blue LED fan with chrome blades that runs at 1500rpm on a 3 pin connector.

Fitting and Testing

Fitting the Kama Bay is relatively simple. If you want to fit it in the upright position like I did them you need to attach the additional metal plates with the countersunk screws provided, this is easy to do. If you want to mount it laying down them you fit it just like a CD or DVD drive. To fit it in the upright position you must have screw holes in your drive bays, this means that some cases with tool-less fittings might not be compatible. Fortunately my case has tool-less mounts but with screw holes alongside.

Even though I’d bought an alternative fan I decided to fit it with the Scythe fan at first to see how it performed. Once I’d got the fan fitted however, I hit a problem, the fan was not rotating at all. At first I thought that it was a simple fan failure but on further inspection it became apparent that it was the dust filter that was catching in the blades of the fan. I removed the Kama Bay and tried to adjust the position of the filter but whatever I tried I couldn’t find a solution except for removing the filter completely, so that’s the solution that I settled on. The filter is just a thin piece of foam and it is held in place by a pair of diagonal rods in the housing but even after adjusting it the fan catches on the foam and makes an annoying noise.

So, I quickly moved on to my Hiper blue LED fan again without the filter in place. This looks fantastic, the fan has chrome blades which can be seen through the front mesh and really look the part. As for additional cooling, my case already had a fully vented front so it hasn’t made a huge difference. It certainly hasn’t allowed me to overclock any further, the non-cpu components (hdd, gpu and motherboard) have come down a degree or two though which is nice.

Conclusion

I am pleased with my final setup of this product but only after disposing of the filter and changing the included fan. Considering that I payed just short of £13 for this it is a very steep price to pay. I bought it from Scan, see here. It is also available in a silver version for those with silver cases, the black matches well with my case and I’m sure most black cases look much the same colour, but I would think that silver cases have a wider variation in colour so it may not match so well.

It is very disappointing that the filter didn’t fit properly to allow fault free use, something that surely should have been tested for, I can only assume that the filter was added as an afterthought or maybe the thickness was changed at the last minute or for my batch.

If this was available as a housing only option then I’d heartily recommend it but for the price it’s just not good enough value.

Pros

• Only retail option available for fitting intake fans into 5.25″ bays
• Housing is well made
• Improves cooling, especially if case is not front vented

Cons

• Expensive
• Filter snags on fan
• Fan doesn’t shift much air

 

Overall Score: 6/10

 

Popularity: 4% [?]