Supplied by ADP Mods

*USD converted xe.com date of review

 

It takes just one look at the Arctic Cooling Freezer64 to realize it is not a standard heatsink. Arctic Cooling uses heat pipe technology able to transfer up to 200 watts to 40 fins. The patented fan holder is said to almost eliminate the "buzzing" sound commonly experienced with 80mm. box fans. The Freezer64 boasts a C/W nearly twice that of the retail Athlon 64 box cooler.

ADP Mods.com boxed up and sent the Arctic Cooling Freezer64 to the Short-Media labs for testing and the results are in.

 

 

 

 

Specifications

The Freezer64 is different and it takes just one look at the fan to come to that conclusion.

The fan holder suspends the fan beside the cooler to direct air across the 40 horizontally orientated fins.

The fan holder is held in place by two screws on each arm.

Innovation has its drawbacks. It's a proprietary design and If the fan should ever fail only Arctic-Cooling can supply a replacement if the retailer cannot. Note that the Arctic Cooling website warranties the fan for a 6-year period.

The two heat pipe posts form a "U" through the 40 fins.

The Freezer64 comes with a Socket 754-939-940 motherboard mount as well as a tube of MX-1 thermal paste.

The Arctic MX-1 paste hardens during the first 200 hours allegedly increasing performance over the same time period.

The spring clip is more of a tension bar than "springy" clip. The tension lever makes installation easy but once on the heatsink will be held firmly in place.

The heatsink base is not "mirror" finish. It has a extremely slight brushed texture to it.

The heatpipes are actually sandwiched between two layers of the heatsink base.

Noise - Sones and Phons

Arctic Cooling chooses to use the SONE measurement instead of the Decibel measurement system to rate their heatsinks. A SONE is a unit to describe the comparative LOUDNESS between two (or more) sounds. One sone has been arbitrarily fixed at 40 PHONs at any frequency, i.e. at any point along the 40 phon curve on the graph. (see following chart)

Sone: A unit of loudness . A simple tone of frequency 1000 cycles per second, 40 decibels above a listener's threshold , produces a loudness of 1 sone. The loudness of any sound that is judged by the listener to be n times that of the 1-sone tone is n sones. A millisone is equal to 0.001 sone. The loudness scale is a relation between loudness and level above threshold for a particular listener. In presenting data relating loudness in sones to sound pressure level, or in averaging the loudness scales of several listeners, the thresholds (measured or assumed) should be specified.

source: http://roland.lerc.nasa.gov/~dglover/dictionary//s.html#sone

Phon: The unit of loudness level of sound, numerically equal to the sound pressure level in decibels, relative to 0.0002 mircobar, of a simple 1000 cycle per second tone judged by listeners to be equivalent in loudness.

source: http://roland.lerc.nasa.gov/~dglover/dictionary//p.html

 

Decibel ratings are more common but calculated differently but most use the A-Weighted scale (a filter that compensates for the non-flat frequency response of human hearing, in order to get numbers approximating human response.) The following chart shows how sound "loudness" changes over frequency comparing phons, sones and decibels. At a 1khz cycle phons are the same as decibels.

Sones and Phons aren't quite the same as decibels. Most decibel specifications are given using the A-Weighted scale. A sone The following chart compares the Socket 754/939/940 Arctic Cooling heatsinks. The corresponding INTEL models are the same.

Heatsink	Fan RPM	CFM	Sone	dBA (approx)
Freezer64	2200	32	1.0	40 dBA
Silencer64 Ultra	2300	42	1.4	44 dBA
Silencer64 Ultra TC	1000-2500	18-46	0.4-1.5	34-45 dBA
Silencer64	2600	33	1.8	48 dBA
Silencer64 TC	1200-2800	14-36	0.3-2.0	33-50 dBA
XP-120 with Panaflo 120mm. fan	2100	86.5	n/a	35.5 dBA
XP-90 with Panaflo 92mm. fan (FBL09A12M	2450	48	n/a	30 dBA
AVC Z7U7414001	2900-6000	22.23-47.51	n/a	~40 dBA
Ajigo MF043-044A	3050~6000	21~41	n/a	28~46 dBA

The Freezer64 sits in the middle of the pack of the Arctic Cooling heatsinks but is bested in both CFM and dBA noise level by the Thermalright products. However, the Freezer64 is approximately half the price of the XP-120 (with fan) and one third less than the XP-90 (with fan).

Installation

As was mentioned earlier in the article, the Arctic Cooling Freezer64 is different. One look will tell and one look at the heatsink coverage was a surprise.

There was a little apprehension about the "exposure" of a portion of the Socket 939 processor. The traditional heatink covers 100% of the processor instead of 95%. Nevertheless installation was, more or less, the same as most other Socket 754-939-940 style heatsinks. The heasink must have the fan at the "bottom" of the case near to the video card. Those video cards with user-modified RAM heatsinks may have a clearance issue.

The fact that the retention clip lever is between the PSU and heatsink presents a tight space for large hands but not impossibly difficult.

The height of the heatsink is within a centimetre of an ATI 9800 PRO video card PCB so there are no height issues in a mid-tower case.

Testing

Test System

• MSI K8T Neo2 MS-670E2 motherboard
• AMD 4000+ Processor
• 2 x 512 MB Corsair CM512-3200XL TwinX Memory
• 120 GB Seagate HDD
• ATI 9800 PRO 256Mb video card Catalyst 4.9 drivers
• WinXP PRO SP2 updated
• Syncmaster 950P 1024x768 @ 75 Hz

Testing was conducted in a LIAN LI PC67 mid-tower case with only the PSU and heatsink fan operational. The system sat operationally idle for 1 hour prior to running CPU Burn-In 25 consecutive times (Only arithmetic and multi-media ticked). Motherboard Monitor recorded CPU temperature results.

 

	Low	High	Ambient
Heatsink	Degrees Celsius
Freezer64	50	55	26.5
AVC Z7U7414001	46	51	24.2
Ajigo MF043-044A	45	51	23.9

 

Conclusions

The Arctic Cooling Freezer64 is a unique design that is the strong silent type. The fan design eliminates most audible fan blade noise thus giving the listener the impression that the heatsink is quiet. It, in fact, is quiet. It produces less noise than a box fan that is similar or even slightly greater in CFM and RPM.

That is the strong selling point of the Freezer64. It also is more affordable than the heavyweight competition.

 

The test results reveal that the Freezer64 does not quite measure up to the full meaning of its name. There's a large "but" attached to this. First...a reminder that the Freezer64 is extremely quiet. The unique design of the fan reduces noise levels even more but the fan only generates 32 CFM of airflow. That puts it right on par with coolers like the Gigabyte Rocket PRO and SE on low setting. The AMD supplied heatsinks in the tests move upwards of 45+ CFM of air and are comparatively much louder.

There were no system anomalies during testing or an hour or two of game play (Half-Life 2). It's obvious that this is not an overclocker's heatsink. The Freezer64 for the user who likes the sound of silence.

The Arctic Cooling Freezer64 sits in the middle of the pack for price and is available from ADP Mods for under $40 Canadian which is just over $30 USD.

Our thanks to ADP Mods.com for their support of this and many other sites.

 

Scores Breakdown

Attribute	Score	Comments
Design & layout	9	Unique design with the side mounted fan. May be more effective with a more powerful fan mounted closer to the fins. A higher score for a innovative approach.
Modding possibilities	7.5	Could be modded with an LED under the top cowling by running a wire adjacent to the fan wire.
Overclocking features	6	Not an overclocker's heatsink
Performance & stability	7	Sufficient default peformance matching competitors lower RPM heatsinks. Does not perform well against some heatsinks with higher RPM (noisier) fans. During tests there were no system problems.
Price / value	8	Approximately $33 USD or $39.95 CAD. It's good value in a low (almost no) noise heatsink but not if you goal is high performance cooling.
Total score	37.5/50	75%