Refine search for Peripherals

  Leave a comment      Email this to a friend TrustedReviews Newsletters

First up is the Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro, which is from a Swiss company that specialises in low noise cooling solutions. Arctic Cooling is actually more famous for its graphics cards coolers than its CPU coolers these days, with several board manufacturers using them as standard. But this is a CPU cooler and you’d have a tough time fitting it to your graphics cards.

The Freezer 7 Pro is a large cooler, not as big as some of those we looked at last time, but with a 92mm fan makes it larger than your average CPU cooler. The heatsink isn’t that special - it utilises three heatpipes and has two copper squares clamped and soldered around the middle of these. The aluminium heatsink fins are then fitted on top of the three heatpipes to form a squared off section to which the fan has been attached.

The retention mechanism uses four pushpins, much like the stock coolers from Intel. However, this has been attached to the copper square at the base of the heatsink by two points that allow it to move sideways. Maybe not the sturdiest way of attaching your CPU cooler, but at least you don’t have to remove your motherboard to fit it. It’s also very easy to install and comes with pre-applied silver thermal grease – all in all, there isn’t much more you could ask for.

What is special about the Freezer 7 Pro is the fan, I’ve never seen anything quite like it before, but it works a treat. The fan is suspended on front of the heatsinks in a plastic cage – to protect your fingers – and this is then attached to a plastic frame with the help of some rubber bushes. This has been done to reduce vibration and noise and it does the job very well. Even at full speed the fan is hardly audible over the rest of the components in a system and you can’t get much better than that.

Normally high performance cooling and low noise don’t go hand in hand, but the Freezer 7 Pro – spoiler alert – was the best cooler under heavy load. It never got hotter than 52 degrees Celsius at full load, which is very impressive. The idle temperature of 44 degrees was not quite as good as some of the other coolers. However, as the increase was a mere eight degrees, the rise in temperature is much lower than any of the other coolers tested.

Verdict

So the Freezer 7 Pro is quiet, efficient and it cools well, which must mean that it costs a fortune right? Well, actually, no. It’s a bargain at £16.39, making it the cheapest cooler on test. Taking everything into account the Freezer 7 Pro is a clear Editors Choice winner.

Add your comment