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A criticism of the Freezer Xtreme (Rev.2) was that the cooler was very heavy and rather large to be relying on a simple four push pin mounting system. The Freezer 13 is lighter and smaller and while this will immediately alienate a portion of the audience reading this, it is rather refreshing to use such a simple system for installation.
It took literally 30 seconds to fit the plastic mounting bracket and the four push pins are strong enough to feel as if they could deal with heavy handed abuse. They can be used for both AMD and Intel platforms, although we are using an Intel Core i7 920 and ASROCK 1366 slot motherboard, seen above.
Once the plastic bracket is fitted, then the cooler needs to be positioned for two screws to be attached. At this stage we need to remove the 92mm fan bracket to get access to both sides.
Once both screws are tightened then the plastic fan shroud can be refitted. It is important to ensure that the fan is pointing either upwards or to the right in your chosen chassis to create a strong down/up or right/left airflow. As you can see in the image above right, the cooler doesn't block any of the ram slots either (regardless of mounting position), a problem with some of the bigger heatsinks, especially with memory using oversized heatspreaders.
Above, we can see the Freezer 13 paired with an overclocked HD5870 and Accelero EXTREME Plus. Above, installed inside an Xigmatek chassis.
That push pin idea is not going to be liked by the enthusiast high end users, but for a guy moving up to his first 3rd party product it makes a lot of sense. its easy to fit and performance is really good. £15? fuck me.
What a great little product that is. I can see a lot of people picking this up for a good first move into the more serious market. Thermaltake Contact29 is a good one also.
That is an impressive cooler, cant get over the 20 euros price point. my lunch cost me more today. they seem to deliver good mainstream, but affordable products.
Great value for money, even if it has a few faults imo.
It is hard to fault this product. there are a few things I would change, such as the 92mm fan for instance, and I dont think you can mount two fans looking at the other side of the design, but for the price, what the hell.
I like this, I used the older 7 cooler for a long time and it did the job, very well too I might add.
People slag arctic cooling off for no backplates, and its the reason I buy them. I assume a lot of other people who cant be bothered with backplates also like it. im not into getting every mhz out of my processor, but I got great overclocks with the last cooler of theirs I used. this looks like a win-win.
I have been buying arctic cooling for years. I still want that accelero but can find it nowhere over here.
These are great coolers so people can bin their reference cooler without having to learn a whole bunch of mounting crap. After all, if you bought a system, didnt now much about building a PC, imagine getting home and realising you had to remove the motherboard and rebuild the computer? Its all well and fine being a kitguru – guru, but most people dont want this hassle. seriously.
Thumbs up from me. its not a high end peformance cooler, but it also doesnt cost £65 quid. you could get almost 4 of these for the price of a noctua NH D14. nevermind the coolit vantage at £100 !
I wanted to thank you for this excellent review. I bought a system from dell and it has an intel reference cooler. I have been learning a lot by reading this site, but im not confident enough yet to mount a watercooler or something high end which means I have to rebuild the pc. its working fine, but my CPU is hitting 85c when i overclock it, and I dont want that. £15 well spent I think. when is this available ?
Comparing price of this fairly low budget cooler with Noctua D14 is completely bonkers. Both products are – pretty much – at the opposing ends of the scale. Used twice AC coolers on very low budget builds, and both while delivered (when compared to stock Intel heatsinks) satisfying results were incredibly loud when at full tilt. Since then used only high end coolers and never looked back. Worth every penny/cent/[put here whatever currency you like].
36.4CFM airflow is far too little for even medium OC. Pretty much any decent 120mm fan will beat that easily delivering 50+CFM at much lower rpm/noise ratio. And almost 40dB is out of the question, unless you enjoying work in “industrial zone” environment. Honestly, if you want to do some OC and don’t want to spend fortune on cooling I understand, but look only at models with min. 120mm fan(s). There is plenty of choice there with some really good stuff for little money. I’m frankly amazed that 80/92mm fans didn’t died altogether. Simply not good enough for anything but low budget/office/home media builds.
Hakuren, it is like you selectively read parts of the reviews then focus on something you aren’t even actually reading right.
The reason the noctua price was mentioned was because the reviewer didn’t want to compare them, head to head. due to this fact. Also I think your comments about simply not good enough for low budget office builds is ludicrous. The testing showed otherwise. I suggest you start your own tech site and see how it goes. 40db is not loud at all by the way. If you want to spend 65 quid on a Noctua NH D14, thats great, but this review is not for those people. There is a NOctua NH D14 review here, and I think it was compared against H70 also later on.