Arctic Cooling Freezer i30 & Freezer 13 CPU Cooler Review @ [H]

Arctic Cooling Freezer i30 & Freezer 13 CPU Cooler Review - We are today reviewing two of Arctic Cooling's new CPU coolers. Both use fans for cooling. The Freezer i30 boasts enthusiast features with overclocking in mind, the Freezer 13 comes in a smaller package with sound levels in mind but still espouses a cooling capacity of 200 watts with near silence.

I really like Arctic Cooling fans and own a few 120mm ones for my case. However, I have a tough time weighing this HSF against other comparative competition from the likes of Noctua, Xigmatek and Phantek (others omitted just because they didn't come immediately to mind).

As such, it would have been nice to have weighed in other mid-level performers or even a top-level performer for comparative reasons such as what other sites do. Example

Good review in all, but I had to do a bit more searching to get other comparisons.

I love AC coolers, cheap and keep your CPU very cool. Better then stock by a wide margin and aren't very expensive.

Not the best for OC'ing but I'd go for a closed loop if I were to do that. But these do give you a decent amount of room for OC'ing still.

Thx for the extensive information regarding the 4 DIMM slot clearance !

how does this compare to the CM EVO 212 ?

keep in mind there's that low profile samsung stuff that's overclocking like crazy... so you could easily populate all four sockets with that memory.

Thanks for this review, I have an i30 coming in the mail for my new build right now.

Zoson said:

keep in mind there's that low profile samsung stuff that's overclocking like crazy... so you could easily populate all four sockets with that memory.

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This is the memory I have right now for the build waiting for this cooler. I've only got two sticks now but I should be able to fit four in later if I want to. I'll probably populate the blocked slot with these two to make upgrading easier in the future.

What IMO would be good additional info is what fan speed was approx at max clock speed .

With so many new HS with PWM fans it would help in comparing .

Vaelin said:

Thanks for this review, I have an i30 coming in the mail for my new build right now.


This is the memory I have right now for the build waiting for this cooler. I've only got two sticks now but I should be able to fit four in later if I want to. I'll probably populate the blocked slot with these two to make upgrading easier in the future.

Click to expand...

If you go this route, you won't get dual channel until you end up populating the other two sockets.

Thanks for the review.

Great review. I had to pop in and check how my old favorite Ultra 120 holds up against these newer coolers. Its still rockin like a champ, I'm glad I decided to keep it when I made the move to IvyB.

Zoson said:

If you go this route, you won't get dual channel until you end up populating the other two sockets.

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I finally got everything together and running last night and I misunderstood what you meant when I read this initially. But yeah, the covered slot is not one of the ones to use for dual channel.

I had feared in reading the review that I'd have to take the heat sink off to install additional sticks into the last two RAM slots later, but that isn't the case. With the i30 and the ASUS P8Z77 ATX motherboard I'm using, the housing that holds the heatsink fan to the heatsink can be easily removed to reveal the covered DIMM slot and then snapped back on. This means that one can just pop the fan off the heatsink, install the memory sticks, and pop it back on without much of a hassle.

This option only works for shorter RAM though. No sure exactly how short, but the pictures in the review make it look that even standard height sticks might not work (it looks close), any RAM with a vertical heatsink looks to be out of the question. The samsung low profile sticks I'm using won't have a problem filling all four slots though.