Arctic Cooling Freezer 11 LP Review

1. Introduction2. The Arctic Cooling Freezer 11 LP3. Installing the Cooler4. Testing Methodology5. Closing Thoughts6. View All Pages

Arctic Cooling have been releasing some great products this year and we have reviewed many of them on KitGuru, such as the incredible Arctic Cooling Accelero XTREME Plus cooler, which we really liked.

Today we are looking at the baby brother of the Freezer 13, the new Freezer 11 LP (Low Profile) which looks to be an ideal partner for a small media center system build.

The Freezer 11 LP supports Intel 1156 and 775 slot solutions and like most Arctic Cooling products is competitively priced to appeal to the widest possible audience. With a 92mm low spinning fan, noise levels should also be ideal for a living room environment.

Dimensions	115L x 106W x 53H (mm)
Minimum PC Case Height	70mm
Fan	92mm
Fan Speed	900-2000 RPM (controlled by PWM)
Air Flow	27 CFM / 46 m3/h
Maximum Cooling Capacity	90 Watts
Noise Level	0.4 Sone
Bearing	Fluid Dynamic Bearing
Weight	225g

The Arctic Cooling Freezer 11 LP is supplied in a simple plastic shell casing which is moulded to the shape of the cooler. This is a standardised shipping style for Arctic Cooling and while we appreciate it probably looks good in a store, we wonder if it would survive abuse from couriers. To open the package you just pop the tabs, which is a nice touch.

Arctic Cooling supply mounting brackets for both Intel platforms as well as all necessary mounting equipment.

The cooler itself is a straightforward design with a 92mm fan blowing down onto the aluminum fins underneath. It uses two copper heatpipes to transfer heat from the CPU.

The Freezer 11 LP is a 54mm profile design which means it will fit into most media cases currently available on the market. MX2 thermal paste is preapplied onto the base which saves the end user some time fiddling about with tubes of paste. We would have hoped they could have preapplied the latest MX4 paste, however processors cooled by a low profile solution are rarely (if ever) overclocked so it should be more than enough.

The Freezer 11 Low Profile above (right) next to the Thermaltake Slim X3. It is a slightly larger design and the heatpipes are thicker.

Today we are using the Zotac H55-ITX motherboard with an Intel Core i5 655k. The Freezer 11 LP requires two mounting brackets to be fitted.

Unfortunately to get both of these fitted on the Zotac motherboard we had to remove the northbridge heatsink. I know from past experiences that these really aren't needed if you are running at reference voltages within a decent chassis. I did however use some thermal epoxy to adhere a smaller heatsink to the core.

This left me enough room to fit the cooler with the heatpipes on that side. Rotating the cooler wouldn't work as it would intrude on the ram slots or the PCIe slot for a graphics card installation.

Four screws are fitted through the plastic shroud into the brackets underneath, a simple procedure which only takes a few minutes. Negatively, I am not sure the push pin system would take a lot of abuse.

The cooler in this position allows the fitting of a graphics card, however it is tight and you wont be able to use any cards with a cooler on the reverse side of the PCB. We opted for a Sapphire HD5670 Ultimate Edition, which worked fine.

Today we are using a Core i5 655K processor which is clocked at 3.2ghz and is a dual core design with Hyperthreading support. We are using the Freezer 11 LP against the Thermaltake Slim X3 low Profile cooler and a reference Intel solution.

Processor: Intel 655K Core i5 CPU (review)
Chassis: Lian Li PC-Q11 Mini ITX (review)
Thermal Paste: Noctua NT H1
Power Supply: Corsair AX850 (review)
Memory: 8GB of Hyper X DDR31600mhz by Kingston (review)
Graphics: Sapphire HD5670 Ultimate Edition (single / Crossfire reviews)
Hard Drives: 2.5 inch 200GB and 320GB Fuji
Motherboard: Zotac H55 Mini ITX Wifi

Room ambient temperatures were kept at a steady 25c via air conditioning in our test labs. Idle readings are measured after 30 minutes of testing in the desktop after a fresh boot. We achieved our load results by looping Cinebench R11.5 with Furmark for 20 minutes then taking the highest result throughout this time period.

The Arctic Cooling Freezer 11 LP manages to outperform the Thermaltake Slim X3 by 2c at reference speeds, and 7c against the reference Intel cooler.

While we wouldn’t recommend people run overclocked systems in a small ITX case such as this we decided to crank the CPU speeds to around 3.6ghz without increasing core voltage.

Processor temperatures only rose by 4c under load which is a strong result. Air ambient temperatures increased by a single degree when under load also. It would be possible to raise the overclock higher, but we see no need for a media center system like this – we are already sitting at a solid level of performance with very impressive temperatures.

Return to ambient (idle) is a feature we have recently added to our reviews … we measure the time it takes for a solution to return to idle temperatures, immediately after full load. The faster the time, the better the cooler – for example a Noctua NH D14 cooler will return an Intel processor to idle temperatures much faster than a reference cooler. This is a good indication of how quickly a heatsink can dissipate heat.

14 seconds is a good result for a low profile cooler such as the Freezer 11 LP.

Recently we have changed our method of measuring noise levels. Ambient noise in the room is kept as low as possible. We measure from a distance of around 1 meter from the chassis and 4 foot from the ground to mirror a real world situation.

The room rates as 20-21dBa – the air conditioning unit in the far corner of the room causes this.

KitGuru noise guide
10dBA – Normal Breathing/Rustling Leaves
20-25dBA – Whisper
30dBA – High Quality Computer fan
40dBA – A Bubbling Brook, or a Refridgerator
50dBA – Normal Conversation
60dBA – Laughter
70dBA – Vacuum Cleaner or Hairdryer
80dBA – City Traffic or a Garbage Disposal
90dBA – Motorcycle or Lawnmower
100dBA – MP3 player at maximum output
110dBA – Orchestra
120dBA – Front row rock concert/Jet Engine
130dBA – Threshold of Pain
140dBA – Military Jet takeoff/Gunshot (close range)
160dBA – Instant Perforation of eardrum

The cooler is generally quiet, maxing out at 32.7 dBa under full, extended load. The case also helps deliver a reasonable level of sound isolation from internal components.

As this is a low profile cooler we weren't expecting record breaking levels of performance, however the Arctic Cooling Freezer 11 LP really did deliver some great results with our Core i5 655k. The build quality is excellent and the installation procedure is simple, although we ran into some physical spacing issues with our Zotac H55 ITX motherboard – after a little modification we managed to get it installed.

Performance is excellent, outclassing both the reference Intel cooler and the Thermaltake Slim X3 by a noticeable margin – return to idle results were also impressive.

Negatively, we have a little concern over the push pin installation system, it really doesn't look that durable. If you fit it once and leave it alone however I wouldn't see a problem. We have no pricing information yet for the UK market, but we expect it be very competitively marketed, like all Arctic Cooling products.

KitGuru says: Overall, one of the best performing low profile coolers we have tested, and ideal for confined spaces.

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