Arctic has been hard at work improving their Freezer lineup and this is the result of their
effort.
Howdy howdy guys ponchato here, and today we'll be looking at the Freezer 34 eSports
DUO CPU cooler from Arctic.
Thanks to Arctic for the review sample, and let's get started.
The Freezer 34 is a fairly compact tower cooler released in early 2019 for $40 USD.
It's compatible with AM4, LGA 1151, and LGA 2066 and Arctic rates it for a very impressive
210W TDP.
For dimensions it's 157mm tall, 124 wide, and only 103mm deep.
That gives it unlimited RAM clearance front and rear, so tall heat spreaders won't be
an issue.
It's also somewhat heavy at 764g, though the mounting system feels more than secure enough
for this weight.
Arctic gives it a pretty hefty 10 year warranty, though CPU coolers very rarely fail to begin
with.
Finally, if red isn't your color, the Freezer 34 is also available with green accents, white,
and yellow.
Taking a look inside the box, right on top we have all the mounting components.
Screws, mounting arms, and the MX-4 thermal paste.
Under that, the fully assembled Freezer 34 DUO.
The heat sink is all black and has four 6mm heat pipes with a direct contact base.
They are colored black, but it would've been nice to see the ends of the heat pipes covered
with caps for a more polished look.
That's a minor gripe though.
As the name implies, the Freezer 34 eSports DUO is a dual fan, push/pull cooler.
The P120 fans are part of Arctic's new P-series, the successor to their previous F-series fans.
They have an interesting design with only 5 blades - most PC fans have between 9 and
11 blades - and because of this design Arctic claims a static pressure improvement up to
33% over the F-series fans.
They also have a new motor design with quite a few improvements.
The RPM range is increased to 0 to 2100 RPM, with the fans being able to completely stop
below 5% speed.
That means complete silence under low load, which I'm a big fan of.
The upgraded motors also come with much lower power consumption and significantly less vibration.
So much less, in fact, that Arctic decided not to use anti-vibration pads on these fans,
and that's actually fine.
Even with the fans spinning at 2000 RPM, you can just barely feel the vibration.
Nice work there, Arctic.
And to top it off, Arctic uses a fluid dynamic bearing on these fans so noise and longevity
are top notch.
Arctic has improved their mounting systems by leaps and bounds in the past few years
and the Freezer 34 is the latest iteration.
Installation on AM4 systems starts with removing the stock brackets from the backplate.
After that, you screw in the risers which will hold down the mounting arms.
Next, to prep the heat sink for installation you need to remove the fans.
They're held on with the usual bent paper clip design, except I really like Arctic's
changes here.
The ends of the fan clips hold onto the heat sink by being inserted in little holes on
the top and bottom.
That means when you remove the fans, the clips will stay in place, making reinstallation
much easier.
On top of that, the clips are very easy to hook and unhook from the fans because they
just have a little protrusion bent into the clip that fits into the fan mounting holes.
I've used a lot of fan clips, and these are by far the best and easiest to use.
Anyway, once the fans are off, you add the two mounting arms to the heat sink.
Each one is held on with a single screw and with the fans off there's plenty of room to
maneuver a screwdriver and get them mounted.
With those on, the next step is to add a dab of thermal paste to the processor, remove
the protective plastic sticker on the base - definitely don't forget to do that - and
set the cooler down on the processor.
To hold the heat sink to the CPU, four thumb nuts get screwed down and then tightened completely
with a screw driver.
Once it's mounted, you just hook the fans back on the heat sink and plug them in.
They both have a PWM splitter cable, so you plug the first fan into the CPU fan header
and the second fan into the first fan's splitter.
The whole process only took me a couple minutes and Arctic does a great job with installation
guides.
Their websites offers them in a variety of languages, along with a how to video.
Not a lot of companies go to this level of effort, so bonus points to Arctic there.
And now let’s go to the benchmarks.
My test bench is a Ryzen 3 1200 overclocked to 4.1GHz at 1.35V, and temperatures are reported
as deltas; degrees above ambient.
First we’ll look at the idle results.
These are the noise levels and temperature deltas with no programs running and the fans
at their minimum RPM.
Owing to the fans completely stopping at idle, my Ryzen 3 1200 does get pretty hot with a
29.7 degree delta.
That's pretty spicy.
But then again, temperature at idle really doesn't matter too much, since the processor
is by definition not being stressed at all.
In terms of noise though, the Freezer 34 hits a home run because it doesn't make any at
all.
I like that.
Now we’ll look at the load results.
These measurements are taken with Prime95 running and the fans at full speed to show
the cooler’s upper limits.
The Freezer 34 lands with the upper tier coolers at just over 35 degrees above ambient.
The noise level at full tilt is somewhat higher at 47.5 dB, but it's a much lower frequency
hum than a typical fan with more and thinner blades, so it ends up reducing the annoyance
factor quite a bit.
Now here’s noise versus temperature to show the cooler’s performance across its range
of RPM.
This graph is laid out so you can easily compare coolers' noise levels at a given temperature
or temperature at a given noise level.
The Freezer 34 actually hits pretty close to the Scythe Fuma, a much larger dual tower
cooler, through most of its RPM range.
You can also see the diminishing returns of running the fans at very low RPM, only shaving
off a tiny amount of noise at the low end while increasing the temperature by quite
a bit.
The elbow around 40% fan speed seems to be the sweet spot, with only about a 38 degree
delta and noise level under 33 decibels.
Now here’s the chart of cooler scores, a metric to compare coolers running at their
optimal speed, balanced between cooling performance and noise level.
Again the Freezer 34 hits right in line with the other high tier coolers I've looking at
with a 49.3.
Considering how small this cooler is, especially in terms of depth front to back, that's extremely
impressive.
Finally, cooler score per dollar to show price to performance.
With its very affordable price tag of $40, the Freezer 34 lands near the top of the list
here.
Only a couple of these coolers cost less, but Arctic out-competes almost all of them
in temperature and noise performance, even some of the more expensive coolers.
Nice show from Arctic.
Now, Arctic also has a single fan version, just called the Freezer 34 eSports.
But the DUO is only a few dollars more and still has unlimited RAM clearance even with
two fans.
Unless you have a very specific reason to get the single fan version, which I honestly
can't think of one, the DUO is going to be your best bet.
What stands out to me is that it offers crazy good price to performance.
This is one of the better air coolers I've tested, but also one of the cheapest - 40
bucks is a very affordable price, especially for this level of cooling.
And not only is the cooling great, the noise level is also fantastic.
The fact that the fans can completely stop is a huge feature to have if you care about
having a quiet PC.
On top of that, noise from the fans is also a much lower pitch than others, owing to the
much wider blade design.
So not only is it a very quiet cooler, the noise itself is also less noticeable.
Now I always try to look for downsides in every product I review, or at the very least
things you should be aware of, but I really can't find any with the Freezer 34.
It's not very tall so it'll fit in the vast majority of cases, it doesn't block RAM slots
on either side, and installing it is super straightforward.
I guess it doesn't have LEDs, so that's something to keep in mind if you prefer lights.
Other than that, the Freezer 34 eSports DUO is a well priced, solid cooler all around.
Follow the link in the description to pick one up for yourself.
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I wanna hear from you: do you like having LEDs on your CPU cooler?
Let me know in the comments below!
Thanks for watching, I hope I helped, and I'll see you in the next video.
Whew!
I just had it balanced, on the empty box.
I keep doing that.
I do that way too much, and it's dangerous, and eventually one of these things that's
gonna be to my side, is gonna fall over.
I know that's gonna happen, but I'm gonna try to avoid it.
Why is red such a prominent color?
Weird.