Arctic Cooling – Freezer 64 Pro

This heat sink implements 3 heat pipes cooled by a bunch of aluminum fins. A typical heat pipe consists of sealed hollow tube made of a thermo conductive metal such as copper or aluminum. The pipe contains a relatively small quantity of a “working fluid” or coolant (such as water, ethanol or mercury) with the remainder of the pipe being filled with vapor phase of the working fluid, all other gases being excluded. (Definition from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pipe).

That compound you see already on the bottom of the AC (Arctic Cooling) Freezer 64 Pro is applied for you by AC, thanks guys! That stuff is Arctic MX-1 thermal compound. AC says “This compound hardens during the first 200h while the performance improves steadily. With heating up the paste / heat sink the process can be shortened.” Note: This stuff is still on this heat sink 30 days + after installing it, it works well.

The installation is really simple now, compared to a few years ago. No more screwdrivers, no more bloody fingers, and no more scratched motherboards. The Freezer Pro has a nice plastic lever that is finger friendly and the cooler installs in very little time. You simply line up the 3 holes on one side of the socket, line them up on the other side of the socket, and then push the lever down. The provided instructions are simple, to the point, and practically unnecessary. I do appreciate the attention to detail though.

After this unit is installed, it is quite appealing to the eye. It looks like the New York City skyline in my PC now. The Freezer Pro is towering and massive. This is where you get to see the well thought out design. Because this unit is so large, it positions itself perfectly in front of most case’s exhaust fans. The idea behind this is that incoming air follows an uninterrupted flow in and out of your case. Instead of trying to steal air from the flow inside your case, this unit simply uses the flow to aid in its cooling. Below, you will see the “traditional” layout of ordinary heat sinks and the improved design by Arctic Cooling.

This layout really does help when it comes to cooling, because there is less work involved in getting the fresh air over the heat sink. Ok, so now you want to see how this this performs eh? In these charts you will see the idle temperature, the ambient temperature (inside case), the temperature at 100% load, the room temperature, and two others. The two others are the really important ones. These are the difference between idle and ambient, and difference between load and ambient. To better understand this, I will attach two charts.