Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro

A shiny new Arctic Freezer 7 Pro CPU fan arrived today, to help keep my Intel Core 2 E6300 a bit cooler than the stock Intel fan can manage.

The Freezer 7 Pro was ordered from Overclockers at a price of £18.79. I chose the cooler partly because of its reasonable price and partly on the recommendation of the forum users at Overclockers.

In the box you get the cooler, some basic instructions on how to fit it and an Arctic Cooling sticker for your case. The Freezer 7 Pro is a chunky combination of fan and heatsink, measuring 107 x 97 x 127 mm, so make sure it’ll fit in your case before buying.

Fitting the cooler is a fairly simple affair. First you have to remove the fan and its plastic mounting from the heatsink, which is easily done and makes the fitment of the cooler much easier. Then you line up the cooler so that the fan will be facing the front of your case, and then push the four legs into the sockets on the motherboard. This is the slightly fiddly bit as you have to apply enough pressure to push the pins into place, but not so much that you snap your motherboard! Push the pins in one at a time, going diagonally opposite for the first two pins. The good news is that the pins on the Freezer 7 Pro snap into place much more easily than the original Intel cooler. Once the heatsink is in place you can re-attach the fan and plug the power cable into your motherboard.

One downside of the Freezer 7 Pro is that its size means there is no longer any room for the exhaust pipe that forms part of the Antec Sonata case that I use. The idea of the exhaust pipe is that it controls the air flow within the case and directs hot air straight out of a vent at the back, separate to the main case fan. However, with a new Noctua NF-S12 case fan pulling the hot air away from the Freezer 7 Pro I don’t think that it will be missed.

I decided to leave the thermal paste that was already applied to the Freezer 7 Pro, just to see how it copes. The answer is quite well as the Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 now idles at around 32°c, as opposed to the mid 40’s that it used to with the Intel cooler. I’ll leave things as they are for now, but I have got a tube of Arctic Silver 5 thermal compound to try out and see if temperatures can drop any further. Even after a couple of hours of Far Cry 2 the CPU was only up to 36°c, so the cooling effect is more than adequate.

An additional benefit of the new cooler is that it is much quieter than the stock item, and in conjunction with the Noctua case fan it has dropped the noise from my case considerably. Unfortunately it’s made it glaringly obvious that the fan on my Nvidia 7600GT is rather loud!

Overall the Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro is highly recommended. It’s reasonably priced, does an excellent job of cooling the CPU and the fan is whisper quiet. It’s a worthwhile upgrade if you’re still using a stock Intel cooler and is worth considering if you’ve already upgraded .