Air cooling has come along way in the last decade and has gone through quite a few adjustments along the way. Thanks to innovation from manufacturers such as Zalman and ThermalRight we now how some truly wonderful designs on the market which perform so much better than what was available just a few short years ago, and I think it’s safe to say that now is probably the golden age of air cooling.

With the recent introduction of heat-pipe technology air coolers have the potential to knock on water cooling’s door. An air cooler will never be able to seriously compete with good watercooling, but the performance gap has closed significantly. Where watercooling wins hands down is the performance headroom versus noise output – a good watercooling setup will always be able to dissipate more heat with less noise than air, but its only really serious overclockers who will need this extra horse power. Moderate overclockers need not apply.

The downsides to watercooling are the financial investment and the time and effort needed to install it. Let’s take the cooler on review here today as an example - the Freezer 64 Pro from Arctic Cooling. It took me literally one minute to install and turn the test PC on. You can’t do that with watercooling, that’ll take an hour minimum.

The truth is it’s not exactly fair to compare watercooling against air cooling in the literal sense as the price difference is just too large to make that argument work. Watercooling if set up correctly can be far superior but not everyone will want to spend up to £200 on there cooling solution, not when £30 can get you a cutting edge air cooler with excellent performance, a short installation time and the minimum of research and understanding to boot. I suppose my main reason for bringing this up was that I’ve been watercooling for the last 3 years and for my main gaming rig I wouldn’t, simply couldn’t think of going back to air cooling, until I tested this one.

One of the things that took me to water in the first place was fan noise. To get the most out of air cooling you have to accept a certain amount of noise, or as least that’s what I thought…. The Freezer 64 Pro’s 92mm fan is absolutely the quietest I’ve ever heard, or not heard if I were to be more precise! Normally you would have to compromise on the cooling efficiency to achieve this sort of silence, but it doesn’t seem to be a concern for the Freezer 64. Sure, it cannot compete with my water cooling setup and it would be rather stupid to expect it to. What it can do is handle an overclock of 2.5GHz with 1.6V as opposed to the stock 2.0 GHz with 1.4V without temperatures exceeding that of an active volcano, which quite frankly surprised the hell out of me