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Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro

by on19 July 2007

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Review: Chillin' like a villain

 

Arctic Cooling is a household name when we talk about cooling. They are famous for cheap but reliable quality products and the Freezer 7 Pro is exactly that. You’ve probably had a chance to read about it, but if you haven’t – here’s your chance. We haven’t had the chance to test it until now, so we had to take a couple of photos as soon as we removed it from the box.

 

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Seeing that the fan is fixed by rubber pins that help in minimizing vibrations, and knowing the quality of Arctic Cooling fans, we were sure it would be silent while in use. It is easy to take off which comes in handy when cleaning it; all it takes is a moderately strong pull on the latches that sit on the sides of the cooler. 

 

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We’re talking about Arctic Cooling's 92mm fan spinning at 900 – 2,500 RPM. The fan speed adjusts according to the processor thanks to the PWM chip in the motor, which enables accurate speed control trough the motherboard's BIOS. There is no manual fan controller, at least not a hardware one. However, you can affect the fan speed by using any temperature-control tools. We simply did it from nTune, and you can install it on any motherboard using an Nvidia chipset. Dynamic fan speed controlled by the PWM chip is the ideal solution for those who want to install the Freezer 7 Pro and stop thinking about processor temperature and fan speed settings.

 

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The cooler design is classic, we see U-shaped three heat pipes that transfer the heat from the processor to 42 aluminum fins. A couple of the fins are bent downwards in order to route the airflow from the fan towards the power circuitry on the motherboard. That should help with over-clocking when the components are heating up.

 

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We didn’t find any thermal paste in the box, but it’s not needed seeing that an adequate layer is spread onto the base of the cooler. The paste in question is Arctic Cooling MX-1 High-Performance Thermal Compound, the paste we had a chance to use, and it does a really good job of heat transfer from the processor to the cooler base.

 

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Setting it up is quite simple, it uses latches just like the original Intel cooler. The stability once set up of the Freezer 7 Pro is satisfactory. Although in practice we often found badly manufactured latches and pins, these are well made and latches on properly.

 

This cooler is Intel Socket 775 compatible, and if you want to cool AMD processors, Arctic Cooling offers the Freezer 64 Pro, which is almost identical to this one.

 

For testing we picked our standard test platform that consists of:

 

Motherboard:
Nforce 680i EVGA board (Supplied by EVGA)
 
CPU:
Intel Core 2 Duo 6800 Extreme edition (Supplied by Intel)

 

CPU Cooler:
Akasa EVO AK 922 Blue Athlon 64/X2/FX cooler and Intel CPU's (Supplied by Akasa)

Artic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro (Supplied by Artic Cooling)

 

Memorija:
OCZ Reaper PC2-8500 1066MHz 5-5-5-15  (Ustupio OCZ)
CL5-5-5-15-CR2T at 2.3V

 

Grafička kartica: Gainward Geforce 8600GTS 512MB (Supplied by Gainward)

 

PSU:
OCZ GameXStream 700W (Supplied by OCZ)

Hard disk:
Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 500GB SATA (Supplied by Seagate)
Artic Fan 8 PWM (Supplied by ArticCooling)

 


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Last modified on 20 July 2007
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