Arctic's New $28* Freezer 36 Air Cooler & Contact Frame: CPU Cooler Review & Benchmarks

[Music] hot on the heels of the liquid freezer 3 Series Arctic is now trying its hand again with air coolers this is the freezer 36 it's a single Tower solution it's relatively fat does that for the fan solution it's durable and it forces a contact frame for Intel just like the liquid freezer 3 does but we're going to test and see if this one has a little bit better pressure distribution this freezer 36 cooler follows the prior freezer 34 E Duo Arctic also previously made the freezer 50 which we hated I've been here for 3 hours and I haven't even turned the computer on yet but this one doesn't make any of the mistakes that the freezer 50 made where it was strapping plastic appendages to a cooler and taken away from clearance for memory and also just generally not a good idea to insulate a cooler with a bunch of plastic so they've learned from the 50 Arctic tells us that the launch price of the freezer 36 will be much lower than it official longer term MSRP similar to what happened with the liquid freezer 3 so for 3 months they're saying that this cooler is supposed to be $27 and. 71 cents on Amazon officially this is a $52 cooler though which immediately makes it less interesting than a lot of other things like the Peerless assassin at 35 or so or some of the other incumbents but we'll see how it does and at least while it's at 28 bucks sorry 2771 it may be able to undercut thermalite and that's thermal right's game they've been playing the game of undercutting everyone for a while now we actually asked Arctic to comment on this apparently new strategy they sent this response well two can play at that game before that this video is brought to you by Squarespace and visiting squarespace.com Gamers Nexus will give you 10% off your first purchase with them we've built a number of our own websites of Squarespace where we list catastrophic PC Hardware failures to inform subscribers of those failures we also built our store website with Squarespace using its built-in e-commerce tools and of course we built a website for our CEO snowflake because she demanded our audience know who really runs the show get to the core of your idea and spend less time on web design by signing up at squarespace.com Gamers Nexis or click the link below so a lot of interesting stuff with this cooler today but the most immediately different part is that fan attachment where it snaps in with four screws on the back of the fan in the normal screw locations they just use fat Phillips 2 screws uh and round heads that push into these plastic snap-ins basically to hold the fans in place so it feels like this week has been sort of an exploration of mechanically interesting products we had the legion go yesterday with the separable controllers now this now this Arctic solution is definitely in the Reinventing the wheel territory although it makes a firm connection and a satisfying snap is not a particularly wanting area of improvement and air coolers the downside to this approach is mostly the relatively large trade-off in thinned surface area for the track that's provided plus the deeper cut for the plastic popping locations Public Enemy Number One for changing anything with fan Mountain on air coolers is normally just can you replace it if you need to in the future the good news is they have built this in a way where it doesn't interfere with replaceability of the solution so even if the plastic joints in here uh break or something or snap it is a separable screwed in piece that could come out uh and be replaced if you contacted Arctic for replacement unfortunately this works with any fans that's a big upside you could just screw these into the backside of another fan and theoretically it'll pop in the same way but Arctic has this indent in the fan backside that helps to ensure a flusher fit you'd probably lose that with most alternative fans which might hover just off the surface of the heat sink we'll give them credit though for a good design overall it's trying to compete in the extremely budget end of air coolers but also not depending on which price you look at so Arctic is uh definitely trying to fight thermal right at the moment we had a fight for your fight fight for your thermal right to I'll I'll leave the freezer 36 is a single Tower but it's a fat Tower so this is relatively wide the dual fan approach helps to resolve issues of maintaining pressure through this deeper fin stack where this is a 54 mm wide Tower that's pretty big as far as single to Solutions go uh so having both fans will help pull the air through faster maintain that that flow rate in the pressure through there as a reference the Deep cool ak400 is about 43 mm across to the 54 on this one while the AK 620 as an example this is a dual Tower dual fan cooler uses two towers that are both about 40 mm across so the total size total surface area is greater than what you get on the freezer 36 uh but this is still significant compared to the more commonly 40 mm or so single Towers one of the potential positives with this approach other than maybe helping to control and keep the price down is also just the total size so it does end up being a little more compact in total it's about 104 millim across when you have both fans attached to it so it does maintain a relatively Stout uh overall posture for the cooler and then for the cold plate when we start looking at the bottom here this is a simple four heat pipe design it's got four direct contact copper heat pipes that are exposed the total contact patch of the freezer 36 is relatively small at 31 m by 41 mm counting the aluminum part of the plate and depending on how you count the staggered pattern you get on those heat pipes at the edges that's enough to cover the most modern heat spreaders LGA 1700 CPUs are about 39 x 28 or so am5 is about 34x 34 am4 is about 37 x 37 give or take half a m on all of those we'd expect the freezer 36 to have its weakest performance performance on both AMD platforms as compared to competing options that have a larger cold plate and that's part of why for our testing today we're looking at Intel and AMD alike so we have LGA 1700 coming back and that's also to test the specially made contact frame uh which this is the only way to install this on Intel so you will be removing the ilm just like we talked about with the liquid freezer 3 it's interesting direction that arctic's going time to get into testing for this so we're going to get into The Thermals first we'll look at AMD Intel and also cover the pressure Distribution on both platforms then we'll go to Mike for installation instructions and his thoughts on the pros and cons of the mechanical aspect of installing the cooler our noise normalized 200 W heat load on AMD is first this one has the Arctic freezer 36 at 59° C over ambient or about 80° when factoring in our ambient temperature that still gives plenty of Headroom thermally for even cases on the mediocre side and you can learn more about cases and our upcoming case review is actually the first one back in over a year is in Just 2 days ATX cases aside the result has it about the same as the venerable Scythe fuma 2 which was at one point the most nois to temperature efficient cooler on our charts the reigning Champion for best overall last year the Peerless assassin lands at 56° over ambient and maintains an advantage over the new freezer 36 the primary differentiator between these will be looks and price Arctic has shown that it wants to compete on pricing this year so these two may be closer than previously another noteworthy entry is the AK 620 a Twan Solution that's almost 2° cooler than the freezer 36 so far the freezer 36 handled the heat load so that's a good start however it has competition from several other dual fan air coolers in some respects it has a slight size Advantage if you favor slimness as it's a relatively narrow heat sink with the single Tower if Arctic hits that $28 Amazon sale price for launch of this cooler like it told us and we have no way of verifying that right now since we're filming before launch then its biggest strength would be comparable performance if sometimes slightly weaker while being cheaper than most of these other options moving to 100% fan speeds we unbind the coolers fans to allow them to run as fast as they can this eliminates noise equivalence but it shows a natural point of differentiation the freezer 36 at 1861 RPM and about 39 DBA held a 57° result tying it with the dark Rock Pro 4 which was quieter and the GEOS shark jf-1 13k which was louder the fuma 2 remains one of the most acoustically efficient in this chart but it's showing its age the Peerless assassin is up at 53° establishing a temperature reduction from the freezer 36 of 3.3 de but running louder than arctic's solution our 123 watt heat load opens up the charts and adds a lot more air coolers here the freezer 36 held 56.5 degrees over ambient which is about the same as the nhu1 14s single Tower single fan solution so that's actually more impressive for nocta than anyone else uh and it improved on the Deep cool ak400 the AK 620 dual fan cooler runs about 1 degree cooler than the new freezer 36 with the fuma 2 equivalent to the AK 620 the freezer 36 isn't bad but it's not a chart leader it doesn't get that same level of superlative positioning as the liquid freezer 3 Series did the freezer 36 mostly tries to compete on price at least initially and on looks for 100% fan speed on the 123 watt AMD heat load before moving to the T thermals which are pretty interesting the result position to the 39 DBA Frieza 36 effectively tied with the fuma 2 and the Assassin spirit with two fans the purist assassin leads by 3° on this charge but the temperature range shrinks as the result of the reduced heat load they get closer together that's normal the freezer 36 is again not particularly impressive for thermals here but it's also not bad it's just okay the result reinforces our earlier commentary which is that this is more of a price or looks purchase than raw performance there are better options options for Just Pure Performance even at the relatively affordable end although the sub $30 initial sale price makes this extremely competitive on cost vrm thermals are really interesting on this one with our 200 watt load and noise normalized the freezer 36 had the worst vrm thermals of the air coolers on this chart it's still fine in that this vrm can definitely handle running in the 70s without even an ounce of concern but the point is to see where that air is going on a hotter board with a worse vrm this is where a top or a rear fan in the cas would benefit the mosfets in this instance this higher temperature happens because the freezer 36 is a straight through funnel of air the fans are flush against the single tower now the Dual Tower design of other coolers allows some air to exit on its way through and hit the vrm and not sinking the fans lower also means that all of the air goes straight in and out of the cooler and mostly over the vrm heat sink finally we move on to int thermals we ran a limited Suite of a new 28 W CPU package heat load with LGA 1700 to represent air coolers and test the stock ilm against the included contact frame we did not test other contact frames in this Benchmark and instead stuck with whatever mounting hardware came with the cooler as this is the most likely intended use of course using a contact frame on a competitor would also improve its thermals we've done that video in the past though here's the chart this tells an entirely different story which is that the freezer 36 contact frame really works rather than underperforming against the pure this assassin as in the AMD test with stock Hardware it now equates the pure this assassin we can prove Why by looking at the pressure test momentarily this Frame levels the playing field significantly for Arctic on Intel specifically and now again if you were to mount a contact frame for the thermal right cooler also it'd pull slightly ahead but we've already proven that and this is about the included Hardware the ak400 helped set the limitations of performance it wasn't quite throttling but it was borderline on it with a 72 Dee Delta over ambient the Corsair a115 is about three times the cost of the sale price of the freezer 36 making Arc IC and thermal right look like a steel we'll have a separate review of the co air cooler with full depth soon though but the Frame Works the C toe Delta as listed on this chart helped to illustrate some of that point where it's reduced from an 18 to 19 degree quar Toc Delta uh on the other coolers to 16.8 which is closer to the a115 let's look at how it's doing this up now we're going to use our specialized mounting pressure analysis software and machine to evaluate the contact pressure distribution across the heat spreader this looks at the quality of the mounting hardware as always this section of our review is sponsored by our patreon supporters so that's you all thank you to everyone who contributes and helps fund our efforts over on patreon.com Gamers Nexus it's our patreon backers who helped us foot the bill to buy this equipment originally we've used it in almost every cooler review for years since you can also go to store. Gamers x.net if you'd like to donate one time at the bottom of the page or buy one of our brand new Ultra comfortable hoodies with soft interior our solder mats are also a great way to support us and get something really useful in return and they're almost sold out for this production run and won't be back for a little bit so if you want one anytime soon now is a good time to order here's the result for LGA 1700 on the Frieza 36 we did two mounts the First on Intel here you can see the heat Pipes making High Press contact with the IHS this is exactly what needs to happen that's where the pressure needs to be there's a weaker spot toward the lower edge of the scan and on the second from the top heat pipe but otherwise distribution is good the second scan shows high pressure and even distribution across the entirety of the cold plate with one exception up along the top Edge this is why our is able to put up a fiercer fight with the Peerless assassin 120 in our LGA 1700 testing than in the prior testing as for AMD contact pressure it's also good AMD doesn't need a contact frame thanks to the overall flatter IHS design and lower flax of the substrate the flatness though allows Arctic to evenly contact the IHS in most places its biggest weakness here is the heat pipes themselves where we see lower pressure than the outer edges of the IHS ideally the heat pipes would be lit up as higher pressure in this test it's still good distribution it leaves few areas unsupported but it's not as strong as the specialized Intel Mount enough of that now we're going to go over to mik for the installation all right so we're going to take a look at the Intel installation first uh just like the liquid freezer 3 you're going to have to use a contact frame if you install this on an Intel based system so their instructions for doing this outside of a case say to put a piece of foam or material under the board and that is of course to capture the back plate that holds in the ilm and then I've already got the CPU socketed so I'm going to open this latch and I'm going to go ahead and remove the stock ilm this right angle wrench is included it's a Torx T20 though so you can use any T20 to take out these screws okay so that's the stock ISM removed now we can go ahead and install the contact frame frame the frame has uh a orientation triangle just like the CPU so I'm going to line it up with the triangle at the bottom left of the CPU and the bottom left of the contact frame and that's my left not your left and I'm just going to start these four screws before I tighten everything down now this contact frame has two pieces of foam on the back of it we've covered that maybe we can show a shot of that but this is very similar to the thermal right contact frame in the sense that it will make contact with your motherboard and it's fairly easy and straightforward to install I'm just keep walking these in until they're snug I'm not going too crazy on the torque here and that's nice and snug okay so I can remove my foam now that the back plate is secure Next Step would be to apply the thermal paste the the orientation of this cooler matters so you can see the text is readable it's legible to me um just like it would be if this was in a case an upright um the exhaust side uh has a indentation to allow for better fan uh efficiency for the exhaust fan that goes on the back of this cooler so you're going to want that one facing towards the back of your case and I'm just going to walk this in alternating left to right these can be tightened down until they stop or you hit a hard wall and bottom out and that's the cooler itself installed the final step of course is installing the fans and we'll take a look at these in a second but the installation for these is very easy they snap right into place and are held in Via tension from the plastic clips that I'm pushing them into and that's it for the Intel installation so let's move on to AMD so first step as always is going to be to remove these stock AMD brackets next up is the four standoffs and then the two mounting brackets so you'll notice that if you watch the liquid freezer 3 video the mounting brackets here are very similar however they do not have the forced offset that was present on the liquid freezer 3 so because of that they are symmetrical which means you can put uh either one on either side just make sure that these are tight next we'll do our thermal paste and then finally I'll get this side started and get this side started and then I'll just go from side to side tightening down in equal increments and that's the cooler installed we've already shown the fan installation but I did want to take a second and this will we can transition into the critiques and criticisms here um I I really did like the fan retention system they came up with here um it's simple to use um and it's very easy to install kind of almost easier than the standard Clips um they're using a kind of typical plastic you know coarse thread fan screw however it's got a very very small shoulder on on it and that's what's allowing them to have this kind of like little claw plastic claw on the cooler body that this is snapping into and and retaining this screw so that's a very very cool addition um my only complaint about this cooler would be that you're kind of again you're forced to use a contact frame on Intel I'd still like to see uh an option to use the stock ISM in case the user is not comfortable and they still wanted this cooler and didn't have to use the contact frame but that wraps up the installation segment and I'm going to throw it back to Steve we'll start briefly with the visual side of this it is a matte black design if that appeals to you then uh great there's an RGB option also we didn't test that one but you get the idea it's got lights on it um the one thing that I wanted to point out specifically though with regard to looks it relates to Performance too is the solution that Arctic used and maybe one of the areas they've done a better job here that's a really fine attention to detail aspect uh that we haven't talked about is how flush the Fan's fit to this cooler where there's barely a line dividing the the cooler and the fan that happens because of the way they're doing the fourpoint mount in the corners as opposed to say the metal clips that are more standard part of that is also because of the way the fan frame at the edges here is kind of indented to make that match a little more perfect against the the actual heat sink on the positive side if you want to look at performance this does help funnel the air straight through the cooler with minimal loss so there's less sort of call it overspray coming out of the sides or you might have a little bit of a gap in more typical Solutions uh especially those that use the metal clip approach so that is lost allowing the air to just pretty much all get fed straight into the cooler the sort of knock on effect or maybe unintended downside of that is there's also less air finding its way down into the vrm heat sinks and so this cooler as we showed in the 1 1200 watt heat load chart ends up performing the worst in terms of of vrm thermals for that limited uh set of data and the vrm was still fine it's not like it's doing poorly it's the motherboard's job to have a quality vrm with mosfets that can handle enough current with heat sinks on it if necessary uh and handle that aspect of things but it is nice to have some of that extra cooling Boost from the cooler if you're using maybe a lower end board or one that's more borderline in our situation because it's a relatively good board and because the heat load is 200 Watts from the CPU uh this is not a factor this wouldn't affect our purchasing if we were an end user and we'd look instead just at the CPU thermals but it's something to be aware of where if you are running a lower-end board which if you're on a budget you might be then you're not going to get much help from this for The vrm Thermals however mounting a a top rear or a a rear fan in your case will benefit the vrm just as much if not more in a lot of instances so it's not like you can't solve the problem it's just not going to come from this whereas with other coolers we get some of that overspray and especially those coolers that seat the fan down and we'll talk about this in a video coming up it's already filmed actually where uh the fan sits down lower in the frame on top of the cold plate that will cool the be the most so anyway that's one of the downsides now performance was overall middling in the AMD set of test we'll keep our Focus there initially move over to Intel next for AMD it could handle the 200 watt load which is great so that's a good start uh that is not true for every single Tower cooler that we've tested so some of them simply couldn't do it they were overheating we couldn't run them through the they got a a big fat did not finish for those benchmarks whereas the freezer 36 is able to handle it but it is again middling it's not impressive we're not blown away by it it's not a bad cooler it is capable but boring in that respect and so You' be buying it in that situation not for the performance because it's not getting one of those liquid freezer 3 sort of best cooler we've reviewed statements uh you would buy it instead more for the value with that initial sale price now when that price goes away if they ever do bring it up to the retail price that was listed and we'll see maybe they don't because um it would kind of might kill the product uh but if the the price goes up it really does take away a lot of the potential value that it has right now which is combining some of the finer looks that you lose on some of the the true cheapest coolers in the market uh but hitting a price point that the cheapest coolers would hit it just it doesn't doesn't seem likely that they could keep holding that price and make any money uh but we thought the same with thermal right and they're still there so with the sale price this ends up undercutting the AK 620 which is here uh ak400 a lot of times the thermal right pess assassin a lot of times the scyth fuma 2 so it's competitive and as for Intel the story is a little different it's a little bit better for the freezer 36 so uh performance on our just quickly built 28 watt heat load is closer to 250 Watts you look at the EPS 12vt cables that has it significantly better than a single Tower ak400 which we had on those charts as sort of a reference point for the floor so in that test the ak400 was just barely not throttling you put it in a case it's going to throttle uh so that was the this is like the lowest end possible cooler you could put on that CPU we did for the testing and this was significantly better than that which you'd expect it's a lot bigger Tower compared to dual Towers it was roughly equal with the thermal right pus assassin that wasn't the case in AMD testing for reasons that are a combination of uh on Intel this contact frame is giving Arctic a sort of disproportionate advantage and yes you could do a contact frame for the others as well but we're testing what's included so uh so that's part of it the other part is on AMD they they don't have enough surface area in that cold plate depending on which AMD uh generation you're looking at to cover the entirety of the IHS and whereas on Intel it's more or less covered and that's also helping to equalize a performance before between the PA 120 and between the freezer 36 on the charts it was also encroaching on corsair's new large cooler and a lot of that again is thanks to the frame but we think the freezer 36 is much more competitive and interesting on Intel than on AMD based on our testing overall this cooler looking at the totality of everything we've talked about falls into the camp of it's fine it's not a bad cooler but it's really not impressing Us in total like as a complete product there are areas that impress us uh but the entire thing is not it's not just like a clear-cut victory every regard like some of arctic's other products like the liquid freeza 3 for the most part uh so it is fine if the sale price were intended to be a permanent price and sometimes companies do end up doing that we'll see we'll have to wait three months and find out what they do uh but if it were intended to be a permanent price we would be a little more generous for sure on the praise of value probably a lot more generous on Praise of value um the trouble I have is I don't want to commit that hard to praising a temporary value if it's going to change in a couple months so we'll see but at the $50 plus doar price it's not that interesting again it's fine but there are much better options uh for cheaper in some cases and at the $28 whatever it was price that's where it's actually definitely worth considering anyway that's kind of it for this one not bad not particularly exciting uh the pressure was good though they had a really great pressure Distribution on both platforms but especially with the contact frame so maybe that's the biggest takeaway here is that uh this more traditional design as opposed to the flexing cold plate style of the liquid freezer 3 works better to conform to the Intel IHS in combination with this plate and it worked out well for them there so uh Arctic is it's it's good to see them trying with air coolers again because they've been uh less present in air coolers than they have been in liquid so that's it for this one thanks for watching we have a lot of cooler reviews going on lately been building up additional platforms so you see the Intel one popping up now we'll have some more too check back for all that and also ATX case reviews are coming back this week is it tomorrow I think the first video might go up tomorrow so come check that out for ATX case reviews really excited about it thanks for watching we'll see you all next time

Channel: Gamers Nexus

Views: 212,247

Keywords: gamersnexus, gamers nexus, computer hardware, cpu cooler, cpu cooler benchmark, cpu coolers, best cpu coolers 2024, best air coolers for cpus, arctic freezer 36, artic freezer 36, arctic freezer 36 review, arctic freezer 36 benchmarks, arctic freezer 36 vs thermalright peerless assassin, arctic liquid freezer iii

Id: F5Do1wXFliU

Length: 27min 11sec (1631 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 05 2024