Features and Installation

This is a well built heatsink. It has a solid copper base, four copper 6mm heatpipes are soldered to this base (important!  Not all heatsinks have soldered heatpipes), which then bend upward and slightly to the rear before going through an array of large aluminum cooling fins.  The base comes with Arctic MX-4 thermal transfer compound.

The base itself has a nice finish, but not mirror polished. It is quite flat however.

On the front is a 92mm PWM controlled fan, it has forward swept blades to move more air with less noise, and has a maximum power draw of .23 amps (2.76 watts at 12v). The fan cable is nicely sleeved in black.  At full speed the fan makes whooshing air noises, but no mechanical noise you can hear without your head inside your case.  With PWM mode enabled even the whooshing dies down till you can't really hear it anymore unless you have a very quiet house indeed.

The front of the heatsink is flat, this may or may not be a good thing depending on how you look at it.  In theory a bowed and jagged leading edge makes for cooler temps, on the other hand I have yet to find a heatsink with those features that doesn't tend to slice fingers during installation.  My fingers survived installing this Freezer 13 Limited Edition complete intact!

The mounting mechanism for this heatsink is excellent, it's set up to mount to all Intel sockets from lga775 forward, as well as all consumer AMD sockets from 939 forward.

On the AMD side this is quite easy, as they haven't changed the mounting at all through that time period. Intel on the other hand has three different mounting hole locations, one for 775, one for 1156/1155, and one for 1366.  Arctic solved this issue by using a two piece mount system, there is a black fiber reinforced plastic frame that attaches to the motherboard using pushpins.  The frame has slots in the ends to accommodate the various Intel mounting holes.  This means that you don't have to remove your motherboard to install this cooler!  Some pushpin setups are dubious at best and not very secure, but I'm impressed with the setup Arctic has come up with, once the heatsink is mounted it is very well attached.

The pushpins themselves come in two pieces as well, there is a tan shell that you install first, then a black locking pin that locks the shell in place.  The heatsink comes with good instructions for this process.

Once the frame is mounted, the heatsink screws to the frame via a metal bracket that you can see in the pictures above.  You have to remove the fan from the heatsink before you have access to the front screw however.

Removing the fan is simple, you take a blade screwdriver and pry up the two clips on one side of the fan, and then pull it off.

The bracket is set up to act like a spring to ensure a solid mount, and it works quite well. I don't have an AMD setup, so I was not able to test that mounting system.  There are two metal brackets that clip to the AMD stock mounting bracket, and then screw to the same metal bracket as the Intel mounting setup.  It looks like it will be easy and effective.

Once the heatsink is screwed down, the fan clips back on and gets plugged into the motherboard.

Lots of ram clearance!  You can use ram with six inch heatspreaders and it'll fit just fine.

Now lets see how this Arctic Freezer 13 Limited Edition performs!

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