Arctic Cooling was founded in 2001 but really hit the big time in 2003 with the release of the VGA Silencer Rev.3, which became the graphics card accessory to buy if you owned a 9700/9800 Pro. Now, Arctic Cooling have expanded into CPU coolers in the last year and are set to make as big a splash as they did in GPU cooling.

The Freezer 64 Pro is big, but not so big as to cause installation issues. It’s not the prettiest cooler on the market which is mainly down to the proprietary fan. As a package it just doesn’t look aesthetically pleasing but all is forgiven as everything causing it to look slightly off centre is because of performance innovations, especially with the fan. Admittedly though, this thing was rather difficult to photograph and portray its true look. It looks more impressive in person.

You can see here that the fan motor and blades are decoupled from the chassis using rubber mounts. Anyone who knows something about silent computing will know that vibration is the main cause of most obstinate case noise and even extremely quite 17db fans will be quite noticeable if you do not decouple them from your case, so this is a huge bonus point to the Freezer 64 Pro. Another innovation here is the cutaway sides next to the fan blades. This should eliminate much of the whooshing sound a fan would normally make.

The fan here is a low speed 92mm. I don’t have any numbers for CFM, but this fan is extremely quiet and runs at 2200 RPM. Add to this the decoupling used and you have what is probably the quietest fan on the market today. Also note that the fan lead is braided, and it’s of excellent quality.

Moving to the back we see a vast amount of aluminium fins and the six copper heat pipes passing through the entire body and into the copper base.

Here’s a more detailed look at the base plate. As already noted, the heat pipes cascade up through all the aluminium fins allowing the transfer of heat away from the CPU – a very neat design if you ask me.

Installation was painless, though on a DFI Lanparty SLI-D motherboard I couldn’t take advantage of the extra cooling available to voltage converters. The DFI design is different to the reference nforce4 boards and so the cooler faces in the wrong direction. You can see the voltage regulators to the left of the cooler, completely missed by the back of the cooler. It’s pretty much only DFI who has a different design than the reference. Below you can see how it works if you have a reference based motherboard:

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.