Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro Review

Specifications:

Heat Sink	104 x 58 x 126.5 mm
Fan	107 x 43.5 x 96 mm
Overall Dimensions	107 x 96.5 x 126.5 mm
Rated Fan Speed	900 - 2500 RPM (PWM)
Power Consumption	0.16 Amp.
Air Flow	45 CFM / 77 m3/h
Weight	520 g
Noise Level	0.9 Sone
Thermal Resistance	0.17°C/Watt
Thermal Interface Material	Pre-applied MX-1 Paste
Warranty	6 Years

Installation:

I thought the installation of this unit would be a breeze, probably taking around 2-3 minutes, but instead ended up taking about 30. First of all the unit would not clear on my motherboard (Abit AW9DMax) as there were clearance issues with a passive heatsink on my motherboard. I ended up having to bend the bottom few fins to get it to clear, which was not that big of a deal and something that I was willing to deal with to have the cutting edge hardware. So once I made sure my clearances where good, I tried to mount the unit with the four push pins, and let me tell you, is that ever a PAIN! You have to line them up and push very hard to get them in the hole. Then turn the head of the push pin to a locked position and repeat three more times for the other corners. Two of the pins are way under the heat sink and reaching them was a major pain. To be honest I am NOT impressed at all with the pushpin mounting method, and their locations on this cooler just aggravated that. After I managed to get them all clamped in (some liked to pop out) I could finally fire up this machine and hope that the temperatures where within limits.

Testing:

Test setup

• Intel Q6600 ES
• Abit AW9DMax
• 2 x 1 GB Mushkin Xp8500
• 2 x 750 GB Seagate HDD’s
• Mushkin 650Watt PSU
• Windows XP Pro SP2

For testing this cooler I will be booting the machine and letting it idle at desktop for 10 minutes, then running OCCT for 15 minutes. I will then overclock the CPU to 3 GHz and follow the same methods for gathering the temps. I do not have the stock cooler for this Q6600, so I will be using the Thermal Take Big Typhoon as a comparison in the graphs. Since this is a quad core, I will give the average temperature of the four cores as reported with core temp. (temp1+temp2+temp3+temp4/4=result)