Arctic Freezer 33 eSports Edition Review

 Introduction

The name Arctic goes back a good amount of years. In 2001 Magnus Huber (CEO of Arctic), founded the company Arctic Cooling which was rebranded to Arctic in 2010. Nowadays selling their cooling products in over 45 countries, ranging from their core products which include cooling solutions for CPU’s and GPU’s to accessories like headphones and even portable speakers.

A few weeks ago Arctic has send us one of their brand new products, the Arctic Freezer 33 eSports Edition, a 210W TDP cpu tower cooler featuring two new BioniX 120mm fans rated for 1.800 RPM in push-pull configuration. Arctic also sells a Freezer 33 eSports One which as the name implies features one BioniX 120 mm fan. These newly developed Arctic BioniX series operate at lower operating temperatures and noise levels compared to their previous fans and therefore have a longer expected life span.

To backup this claim Arctic includes a 10 year warranty on the Cooler. As one of their top tier products the Freezer eSports Edition has an MSRP of € 49,99. Doing a price check in Europe we find prices more in the direction of € 45,00 on average at the e-tailer. If you look good you can even pick one up for a few Euro’s less which is a very attractive price point considering what we have here. A tower cooler with two high quality PWM fans and four 6mm heatpipes painted in matte black and supports all modern sockets except AMD’s Threadripper cpu’s. If you happen to own a threadripper cpu you should look for the Freezer 33 eSports TR with an enlarged base to cover the IHS of a Threadripper cpu.

The Installation of the Arctic Freezer 33 eSports Edition

Saving paper and cardboard is something Arctic has done with their cooler since god knows when. Lately they stopped including a manual with their products, but instead include a QR-code which you can use to download the user manual to your smartphone.

So we did, and this was really straight forward especially since our testplatform an Asus ROG Strix X99 Gaming which due to the nature of the socket does not require a backplate to be installed first. That brings us to socket compatibility. As we mentioned before the ARCTIC Freezer 33 eSports Edition supports all modern sockets but also exclude some older ones and especially on the AMD side the support is rather limited. Only AM4 sockets support this Freezer.

Intel Socket

* SQUARE ILM (80 x 80 mm spacing) only
** c’t magazin has shown in issue 17/2017 on page 96 that Intel i9 CPUs on socket 2066 may draw up to 270 Watts since wrongly programmed BIOS by mainboard manufacturers fail to limit the TDP of the CPU to the specified 140 Watts. This may lead to thermal throttling of the CPU.

AMD Socket

 

 Testing the Arctic Freezer 33 eSports Edition

At Techjunkies.nl we test our cpu coolers at room temperature between 20 and 22 degrees Celcius. Testing is done on an open Dimastech testbench using OCCT (5 min run) and Blender BMW render, stressing all six cores of our Core i7-5930K @ 4.0 Ghz 1.175V. Where Blender represents real life workloads, OCCT or Prime95 for that matter generate even more heat using AVX workloads that requires more voltage to the cpu and thus more heat is transferred. To record temperatures we use HWmonitor and not the highest temperature in every test.

Testbench setup:

• Intel Core i7-5930K @ 4.0 Ghz across all core @ 1.175V
• Asus Strix X99 Gaming
• Corsair Vengeance 3333 Mhz CL16 @ XMP
• 120GB Liteon SSD
• EVGA GTX 1050 Ti 4GB
• Corsair AX860i PSU

The first test we run is Blender with the familiar BMW 1 M series. This takes 6 minutes and 25 seconds to complete. During this run we record the temperatures with HWmonitor. You can find the results below. Click on the image to enlarge.

The second run is the OCCT benchmark. We set the timer for 5 minutes and again record the temperatures during this run.