Every time I sit down with a new piece of hardware, I think how things have changed. When I got my 400 GB hard drive, I thought long and hard about my massive 10 GB Quantum Bigfoot. When I got my DVD Burner, I thought long and hard about my 1x CD Burner. When I got my 3700+ San Diego CPU, I thought long and hard about my 486 DX33. Today, I am thinking long and hard about my Alpha PAL8045 and my Swiftech MCX462+ while I am looking at this Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro. Things have certainly changed.

When I was using those monsters, I never cared about the hissing sound my Delta Screamer made, I never cared about the amount of lift my Vantec Tornado provided. I just wanted a cool processor. Enter the Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro.

It is amazing how our interests change as we age. The good old days of screaming fans and MONSTER heat sinks are GONE, well, sort of anyway! My focus has changed to quiet systems with effective cooling. This Freezer 64 Pro claims it can provide me with effective cooling without sacrificing the "audible enlightenment" I have recently experienced.

I have to tell you, I was really surprised at how BIG this unit was when I pulled it out of its box. This plays into the "well, sort of" above. This thing is incredibly large stretching 126.5 mm in height. That is almost 5 inches tall! However, it all plays into the well thought out design; you will see what I am talking about in a little bit. This heat sink weighs in at a hefty 528 grams. This converts to roughly 18.62 ounces.

The fan on this sucker pushes 40 CFM (cubic feet per minute), which isn't really that much considering the screamers I used to use, but this is quite enough to cool the processor well enough to make its way into my test system for further evaluation. There isn't much noise associated with this fan because it's a bit bigger than the "old fashioned" heat sinks that incorporated 80mm fans. This one uses a 92 mm fan, spinning up to 2200 RPM, with a custom mounting mechanism that really keeps noise down to a minimum.