Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro HSF Review

We test to see how the new Artic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro stands up to the Thermaltake K450. The K450 currently cools my FX-51, FX-55 and FX-60.

Introduction

Today, I am going to look at a fairly new CPU cooler from Arctic Cooling named the Freezer 64 Pro. This is a cooler designed to fit on AMD Athlon 64 CPUs (Socket 754/939/940). Arctic Cooling does also make a version that mounts on Intel systems called the Freezer 7 Pro for the Intel Socket 775.

In today’s testing, I am going to put it up against the Thermaltake K450 which I have reviewed before. The K450 has been my cooler of choice as one is running on each of my FX-51 and FX-55 CPUs, and I had one on my FX-60 test system before this review.

I must admit I was amazed at the size of the cooler when first opening the box; it dwarfed my K450. The interesting thing is that it weighs in at 528g, which is only 100g heavier than the K450.

Specifications

Heat Sink:   104 x 58 x 126.5 mm Fan:   107 x 43.5 x 96 mm Overall Dimensions:   107 x 96.5 x 126.5 mm Rated Fan Speed:   2200 RPM Power Consumption:   0.16 Amp. Air Flow:   40 CFM / 68 m3/h Weight:   528 g Noise Level:   0.8 Sone Thermal Resistance:   0.18°C/Watt Thermal Interface Material:   Pre-applied MX-1 Paste Warranty:   6 Years

Noise Level
The noise level is measured in Sone (loudness) instead of dB (sound intensity). The loudness depends upon ears response curves and tells you exactly, how bothering a certain noise is.

Thermal Compound
We ship our coolers with the ARCTIC MX-1 thermal compound. This compound hardens during the first 200h while the performance improves steadily. With heating up the paste / heatsink the process can be shortened. The performance is even from the beginning good enough to cool your CPU reliable.

Application:
all AMD Athlon 64 
AMD Athlon X2 up to 5000+
all AMD Athlon 64 FX

Recommended Retail Price (excl. VAT):
34 USD / 28 EUR

Installation

The Freezer 64 Pro has the fan and cooling fins mounted in a vertical position versus the horizontal position of the fan on the K450.  The layout of the fan and cooling fins will bring up a new test I tried with the cooler that I will show you in the testing section on the next page.

Due to the size of my RAM (a pair of Corsair’s PC3500 PRO), I had to move my memory from banks A1 and A2 on my A8N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard to B1 and B2.  It’s a good thing the memory controller on the newer AMD X2/FX cores handles the memory configuration without a performance impact.  This may be something to think about if you have the PRO memory from Corsair, which takes up extra room due to the height of the RAM (recall that Corsair’s PRO memory sticks are taller than regular sticks and feature activity LEDs).

I also used the thermal past that came with the cooler since I had read a review on the cooler before I decided to look at it.  In that review, the reviewer used Arctic Silver 5 and the stock paste, and he found the stock paste performed better.  Also, you will notice in the pictures with the cooler in my case, I am using Panaflo fans for intake and exhaust.  The one on the exhaust is the 114CFM Panaflo.  The use of a Panaflo and this Freezer 64 Pro is going to come up in my testing next.

Testing

Here are the test specifications of my system:

• Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe
• AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 @ 2.8GHz (review)
• 2GB Corsair 3500LL PRO
• 3 x 250GB Maxtor Diamond 10 in RAID 5
• PC Power & Cooling 1kW PSU (review)
• Creative X-Fi Platinum Sound Card
• 2 x Reference 7800 GTX 512
• Lian-Li PC-V1200 Case
• Windows XP SP2
• ForceWare 81.98 and DirectX 9.0c

One of the things to notice is that my CPU is overclocked to 2.8GHz, which basically gives you a CPU equal to two FX-57’s.

For testing I did idle testing, load testing and a new test for the cooler I call dead fan testing.  Since this is a dual-core CPU, I used Folding@Home to stress the CPU by running two instances, one for each core.  My dead fan testing consists of unplugging the CPU fan and seeing how well the cooler works.  Of course, my hand was on the power switch to turn off the machine in case the CPU got to 60C.  I also used a stopwatch to see how long it took for the CPU to get to the 60C mark.

	Idle	Load	Dead Fan	Time
Tt K450	45C	52C	60+C	45 seconds under load
AC Freezer 64 Pro	42C	50C	55C	Held steady for over 2 hours

As we can see from our testing, if you have a fan, in my case a Panaflo, the CPU Cooler can run in my case without the CPU fan running.  I have to tell you that gives me a good piece of mind since my machine is usually on 24/7.

Conclusion

I have to say Arctic Cooling has a winner on their hands with the Freezer 64 Pro.  The cooler runs very quiet, and its design, if in the right environment, will even let it run without the fan.  During my testing, the cooler stayed cool to the touch, only getting warm when running the dead fan test.

Pros:

+ Great cooling design
+ Weight is not too heavy for its size
+ Price: Only $29.99 at Crazy PC

Cons:

– Size could be an issue if using RAM with tall heatspreaders (i.e. Corsair PRO or XPERT)

Final Score: 9.5 out of 10 and the Bjorn3D Golden Bear Award