Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro (Rev.2) CPU Cooler Review

1. Introduction2. The Cooler3. Installation4. Testing Methodology and Cooler Performance5. Closing Thoughts6. View All Pages

Installing the Freezer 7 Pro isn't a very cumbersome task at all.  As the cooler is quite lightweight in construction, Arctic Cooling have used a push-pin mounting system, similar to the Intel stock coolers.

First of all we are required to install the retention bracket onto the motherboard.  This is a simple matter of aligning the bracket over the holes, inserting the push-pins and then clicking them into place.  As the cooler supports both 775 and 1156 as well as 1366, the push pins aren't pre-attached which can make installation a little fiddly if you put the pin in the wrong hole accidentally.

Next we have to unclip the fan from the front of the cooler so we can screw it down to the retention bracket.  Two screws later and the fan is ready to be put back on.  The last step is to plug the fan into the motherboard header.

Even though the Freezer 7 Pro is a very small cooler, the fan protrudes quite a long way which could interfere with RAM on some motherboards.  On our Asus P6T we found that the RAM (in the outside slot) touched the fan guard and consequently the RAM stick didn't sit quite upright in the slot.  This said, mounting the cooler vertically rather than horizontally should rectify this problem.

Although the Freezer 7 Pro is supplied with MX-2 paste pre-applied, we replaced this with MX-3 for our testing to ensure a fair comparison with the Intel reference cooler.

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