Ah, Silence, I love it. I want my computer to be as quiet as I can possibly get it, I hate hearing the buzzing of fans, or the clatter of drives. There are many options available for silent CPU coolers, and in my time I have reviewed a majority of them, but today for review I have the quietest CPU cooler I have ever run across. It is the Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro, not only is it silent but it looks great and cools very well. Read on…
Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro
Sponsor: Arctic Cooling
Tech Specs,Features or the Basic Info:
Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro
Application:
All AMD Sempron, Athlon 64, Athlon 64 X2
and Athlon 64 FX (Socket 754, 939, AM2)
All AMD Opteron
Recommended Retail Price (excl. VAT):
34 USD / 28 EUR
Features:
Extremely Quiet
The low speed 92 mm fan reduces the noise level to a minimum.
The patented fan holder is able to practically eliminate the typical buzzing sound of 92 mm fans
Powerful cooling
6 Heat Pipes (three used double sided) are able to transfer heat up to 200 Watt. The heat exchanger is built of 42 fins and consists of a surface area of over 4700 cm2 and allows for resistance free energy transfer to air.
Integrated Cooling of Voltage Converters
Air is drawn in from the side of the fan to cool the components around the CPU.
Some air is blown out towards the voltage converters on the mainboard with the bent fins at the bottom
Patented Vibration Absorption
The four rubber connectors on the fan case act as a vibration damper to absorb the vibration of the running fan. This can reduce significant vibration between plastic fan case and heatsink.
Easy Installation
The cooler is to install without any tools within seconds.
Long Lifetime / 6 Years Warranty
The ARCTIC Ceramic Bearing provides an unmatched Life Time of 137'000h (L10@40°C) resp. an MTBF@70°C of 163'000h and thus a 6 year warranty
SPECS:
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
Additional Info:
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.
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A Better Look at Things
:
The Freezer 64 Pro comes in the standard Arctic Cooling black and silver/gray box, with specs, features and pictures located on all sides.
The Freezer 64 Pro comes nicely packed in plastic packaging to protect it during shipping, on top we find the instructions.
Included with the Freezer 64 Pro is one of Arctic Coolings case badges to let everyone know that you have a quality cooler in your computer.
The Freezer 64 Pro features the silent, vibration dampening fans that look really cool.
A Better Look at Things
Continued:
The back of the Freezer 64 Pro features three fins at the bottom that are curved to direct airflow onto your motherboard for additional cooling of the components near the CPU socket.
From the top view of the Freezer 64 Pro you can get a good look at the profile of it, from the front it looks like the standard square style cooler, but it is actually curved around the back, and the heatpipes terminate out the top.
There is a PWN four pin fan controller, but it can be used on the standard three pin variety as well, Arctic Cooling included a separate protective plastic cover for the base of the CPU as well.
The locking mechanism is very easy to use, the locking lever is nice and large making it a snap to lock in place. The mounting system is similar to other out there, hook the one side on, then the other and lock.
A Better Look at Things
Continued:
The base of the Freezer 64 Pro comes pre-applied with Arctic Coolings' MX-1 thermal compound.
If you read my review of the Arctic Cooling Alpine64 I went into a bit of detail about the base and how it is not exactly smooth, the roughness of the base combined with the MX-1 thermal compound actually promotes thermal transfer.
The MX-1 thermal compound is applied in a fairly thick layer actually, not thin like other pastes recommend you apply them.
The construction of the Freezer 64 Pro is of course excellent, coming from Arctic Cooling this is no surprise. It weighs about the same as the AMD stock cooler, and is almost twice as high.
Installation, Testing and Comparison
As I mentioned installation is fairly easy with the nice large locking lever, but I did have a bit of a hard time getting it to attach onto the mounting bracket. The CPU socket on my motherboard is located very close to the top of the board, and the PSU was a bit in the way, other may not have this problem depending on their mobo configuration, but I did get it in there without having to remove the PSU.
In the above picture the video card is an ATI x1300, but during testing I had my new BFG 7900GT installed, just FYI.
Base System Specs:
ECS KN1 Extreme SLI Lite mobo (review coming tomorrow!)
AMD Athlon X2 4200+
BFG 7900GT OC edition
3 gigs OCZ Ram (gold and plats mixed)
For testing the ambient temperature was 24C, yeah winter is coming…
To achieve idle temp reading I let the system sit idle for approximately 30 minutes, to achieve load temp reading I ran Prime 95 torture test, for the same time duration, one instance on each core. You can click the graph to get a larger view of it.
At idle we can see the Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro kicks some butt, when the load is applied it looses out by a bit. The load temps are still very well within specs, 65C is the high mark for my X2 CPU, so 47.5C is rather cool actually. One other thing to point out is that I have reviewed many coolers and said they were silent, but this is actually silent, dead silent, I had to take the case side off to make sure it was running. I've never heard or not heard a CPU cooler this quiet before, this is nice as I like my case to be as quiet as possible.
So it's a trade off, do you want the temperature drop or do you want a silent case, me I think the Freezer 64 Pro does very well and it will be staying in my machine for quite a while, I'm very happy with it and the temperatures it keeps my CPU at.
Also, one additional little note, Arctic Cooling mentions that the MX-1 thermal compound will not reach it's maximum cooling potential until about 200 hours of use, now that's almost a month, if you use your system for about eight hours per day seven days a week. So by that you can expect the performance to get even better as time goes by.
Doing this review, I've realized that now my main computer is quieter than my HTPC, hmm, I need to do something about that….
Summary:
What can I say? Arctic Cooling is one of the top designers/makers of cooling products, they are just an amazing group of individuals that seem bent of developing the best cooling products out there. The Freezer 64 Pro is a fine example of the excellent craftsmanship that Arctic Cooling is capable of, it looks great, performs well and is virtually silent, what more could you ask for? It's no surprise that the Freezer 64 Pro will be getting an excellent score from me, and it'[s one of those products that I can wholeheartedly recommend to anyone looking for a top of the line silent CPU cooler.
DragonSteelMods gives the Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro a 5 out of 5 score and our Recommended Award as well.
Pros:
-Very, very quiet
-Keeps your CPU cool
-Fairly easy to install
-Looks cool
Cons:
-NONE
I would like to thank Arctic Cooling for the chance to review the Freezer 64 Pro and for their continued support of DSM.