Arctic Cooling Freezer Xtreme

Arctic-Cooling can be considered as one of the companies responsible for the push towards silent PC cooling; they first made name with their Silencer series for VGA cards, while later on their Freezer CPU cooler series provided low cost products with very good performance/noise ratio. Their latest product is no entry level unit though, PC-Cooling.de provided us with the Freezer Xtreme which features 4 large heat pipes and custom 120mm fan.


This product review was made possible by PC-Cooling

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Arctic Cooling Freezer Xtreme

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Arctic Cooling Freezer Xtreme
- Intel S775 / AMD AM2/939 (Rev 2 adds S1366 support)
- Heatsink : 722 gram (574 gr without fan)
- 800-1500rpm Custom 120mm PWM fan
- ~$35

The Freezer Xtreme comes in minimalist packaging, there are but a few essentials inside the plastic container, mounting bracket and clips for installation and a manual. There’s no thermal paste included as Arctic-Cooling pre-applied a layer of their MX-2 on the base. Once this paste is removed we’re met with a copper base which shows only few signs of machine lapping; in it are joined 4 U-form heat pipes which move the heat to the large arrays of aluminum fins. In the middle we find a 120mm PWM fan with custom frame and mounting, it measured 1475rpm@12v, 731rpm@5v. It’s possible to swap it with your own fan, but you’ll have to improvise on securing that fan.



Installation according to the manual is very easy, on AMD you just use the included clips; on Intel you first install the plastic bracket and then screw the heatsink in place. Getting the plastic plugs completely pushed down requires a screw driver (placed as seen in the picture below), once you’ve figured that out you need to remove the 120mm fan and screw the Xtreme in place, this takes a bit of force as the screws are not very long and the two metal clips are bend upwards quite a bit. In the end we did get the Freezer Xtreme installed, but the whole installation method can be much simplified. We suggest push-pins for the bracket as seen with the SilenX, and longer screws.



We compare the performance of the Xtreme to the Freezer 7 Pro, as well as the lower priced 2PCOM PS1264U:



Well this turned out disappointing, with the stock fan the Freezer Xtreme is running quite hot and is not silent at all. The cheaper Freezer 7 Pro is noticeably better at different fan speeds. Compared to the PS1264U the Xtreme stands no chance… until you switch the stock fan, we paired the Xtreme with the high Titan CFM fan and performance went upwards by a huge amount, while this fan is very noisy, its shows that the tightly packed aluminum fins on the Freezer Xtreme are made for high CFM, not low CFM, the stock 120mm fan is not the ideal partner of this heatsink, far from it.

We re-tested the heatsink several times and each time the temperatures with the stock fan were quite high. Maybe we had a broken sample? Not likely… our Freezer Xtreme was approximately ~8°C hotter than the Freezer 7 Pro, while noise level wise it was ~4dBA quieter. We compared our results with those from this huge 68 CPU cooler roundup done by German colleague reviewers; their findings:

7 pro
Resultierende Differenz: 20,215 °C
Lautstärke: 45,9 dB/A

Xtreme
Resultierende Differenz: 26,318 K
Lautstärke: 45,2 dB/A

A 6°C difference in favor of the 7 Pro, quite close to our findings.

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In summary here are the strong/weak points of the Arctic Cooling Freezer Xtreme:



+ Acceptable performance with high speed fans
+ Affordable price

- Cumbersome installation
- Disappointing performance
- Included fan noisy at full speed