The first cooler to grace our new review outline is the Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro. It's been around a while but it still has a great deal to offer. For starters, it's cheap (£16 at time of writing), which means it's a no brainer - if it performs admirably you have no choice but to get one! Complementing the price is the Arctic Cooling brand, which is squarely associated with low noise cooling, so unless something very crazy has happened to the design team at AC, this will be a nice, quite cooler. And finally, it doesn't need the motherboard to be removed for installation, which is always a bonus.

The Freezer 7 Pro is what we'd call a "medium size cooler", the overall dimensions are 126.5H * 107W * 96.5D (mm). It sports 42 aluminium fins, 6 copper heatpipes and a copper base. This type of "configuration", so to speak, has literally become the defacto standard building blocks for all high performance coolers out there today - it offers the best possible cooling with respects to both price and weight. Speaking of weight, the Freezer 7 Pro comes in at 520g.

Build quality is good, but not outstanding. An example of this is to look at the second picture above. The bottom fins are curved to help direct air flow onto the surrounding voltage regulators on a motherboard, but on the review sample these were a little mangled. However, cooling was unaffected and for the £16 price tag you can forgive small issues like this.

As you can see in the pics above, the base comes pre applied with some thermal paste, it's actually Arctic Cooling's own MX-1 paste, which has been said to be a better performer than Arctic Silver 5.

The mounting mechanism is the standard affair you find on the Intel retail cooler. You have four push clips that when rotated into the correct position and pushed down into the surrounding motherboard holes will makes a faint "click" when fully through. I'm going to jump right in here and say I am not a fan of this system as it's fiddly and you find yourself putting pressure on the mainboard to get all four clips in place. But because the Freezer 7 Pro is a medium sized cooler, you can at least have full access to these clips for uninstallation if you remove the fan (which is a very simple process, just two small clips and its off). You then have lots of space to get a screw driver down to the clips to uninstall the cooler. This might sound like a minor plus point, but anyone who has bought a cooler that uses the push clip system but doesn't have easy access to them (usually because the cooler is massive) will know how frustrating uninstallation can be...

As you would expect, the fan is an Arctic Cooling design, not third party. The dimensions are 96H * 107W * 43.5D (mm), which makes it a pseudo 96~107-ish (mm) fan. The fan uses a patented anti-vibration system to decouple the fan from it's casing. In the picture below you can see that between the fan and its casing there is a rubber connector which acts as a vibration damper. This helps absorb the vibration of the running fan and prevent its transfer to the heatsink and case. Does it work? It does indeed. There is much vibration when touching the area where the fan motor is, but on touching the decoupled fan casing there is a substantial decrease in vibration. I've come across these fans from Arctic Cooling before and they never fail to impress from the perspective of noise.

Other spec's include a rated fan speed of 2500rpm at 12V with a 0.16W power draw and produces 45 CFM. The fan supports PWM fan headers, so if your motherboard supports this you'll have options in the BIOS to control the fan speed. On the P5W-DH i used for testing I was given the options of Optimal, Silent, and Performance. Silent ran the fan at around 450 rpm, optimal was at 900rpm, performance ran it at full whack (2500rpm). I didn't use these modes in testing, i used a third party fan controller and tested at 12V, 7V and 5V so to keep things as controlled as possible.

Last but not least, you get a 6-year warranty.