Brice from Arctic reveals all in exclusive interview

One of the world's most interesting shows is Distree, which runs in February down in sunny Monte Carlo. The show's exclusive focus is on bringing together the top sales people from every major vendor with every major purchasing decision maker. It gave us a great opportunity to sit down with champion skier and marketing wizard, Brice Vandervoorde from Arctic.

Arctic has an amazing reputation, built largely on the back of its famous Freezer cooler range. But Arctic hasn't rested on its laurels – not for one second.The first thing we noticed on the Arctic stand was its new range of Apple accessories. For a PC-focused company, this is a little surprise. We asked Brice about these.

“These products are very different”, he says with pride. “We only manufacture this kind of product in Japan – guaranteeing the kind of quality that consumers have come to expect from Apple”.

“While you can get a glossy finish product from a number of countries, there is something amazing about the matt finish materials we get out of Japan”, he explained. We looked. We touched. We admired and agreed with Arctic's choice of production partner.

But what about Arctic's core business? What about serious cooling?

With a big smile, “We have learned a lot from the CPU cooler business and, now, we're applying it to the GPU cooling market”.

“The latest Freezer coolers come with a multitude of fitting brackets, for everything from a Core i7 through to Bulldozer and older Intel chips. Making this product for enthusiasts means we needed a modular approach. Then, one day, our engineers thought ‘Why are we not applying the same principal to GPU coolers?'. And that's where the new product began”, explained Brice.

Looking at the brand new 79xx series cooler, you can see this new ‘modular approach' in action. In the past, you would sometimes have to wait months for a specialist GPU cooler, because the mounting mechanism changed so much that it required a completely new engineering effort. With the Arctic Accelero eXtreme unit, the cooler arrived in the market almost simultaneously with the card itself. Amazing.

“We are working on a lot of these intelligent, modular systems right now”, said Brice. “I think KitGuru's readers will be impressed!”

We think so too.

One look at Brice told us that there was ‘more'. We paused. He paused. Then he spoke, “We are also working on a hybrid design – something that will combine air and water cooling for GPUs in a really smart way”. Nice.

It was at that point that we noticed a brand new flyer poking out from under his briefcase. This details the stunning new system that Arctic will be bringing to market shortly under the name MC101. It will use AMD's Trinity A10 APU (replacement for Llano) which uses Piledriver cores and gives Radeon HD 7760 graphics. When asked about specific launch dates and pricing, Brice became shy.

KitGuru says: You can't fault Arctic for its drive and innovation. From rechargeable batteries, Apple accessories and bluetooth headsets, to modular graphics coolers and even advanced Fusion PCs, these chaps are gunning for your enthusiast dollars and taking no prisoners.

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