Arctic Freezer 36 makes waves in the air cooling market, proving that performance doesn’t need to cost you an arm and a leg. You’ll no longer buy the wrong model for your CPU, as all versions cater to both AMD and Intel, even if it sadly ditches some of the older chips. It’s this innovative bracket that gives the cooler a leg up in the thermals department, and other brands need to take note.
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At less than £20 including VAT in the UK the Arctic Freezer 36 Black is very hard to beat for those on tight budgets. It looks great, performs well, and will be a great companion for a mid-tier CPU from either Intel or AMD. It comfortably gets the Great Value award and is sure to be on the recommendation lists for low-cost home systems with style.
This cooler could not handle the 205W thermal load on AMD Ryzen 9 7950X but it easily handled the 170W load on the same CPU. We hardly saw any significant performance drop. The cooler literally runs silent despite using two fans. This is a good performance package if you are a budget user and looking for a decent cooler with a 6-year warranty. I am not sure the reason for this price drop but if it continues it makes sense.
The most difficult thing about the Freezer 36 is the selection from the 5 different variants, where you can choose from different basic colors, RGB lighting and long-life ball bearings. The build quality is also excellent and the move away from the proprietary fans of its predecessor and the reintroduction of multi-compatibility ultimately make the Freezer 36 an excellent overall package.
Arctic Freezer 36 makes waves in the air cooling market, proving that performance doesn’t need to cost you an arm and a leg. You’ll no longer buy the wrong model for your CPU, as all versions cater to both AMD and Intel, even if it sadly ditches some of the older chips. It’s this innovative bracket that gives the cooler a leg up in the thermals department, and other brands need to take note.
Overall, this falls in the camp of “it’s fine.” If the sale price were intended to be the permanent price, we’d probably give it more praise for value -- but we don’t want to commit that hard to praise of temporary value, as it’s going to change in just 3 months. But we’ll see. Maybe Arctic decides to keep it at this mark.
If I had to sum it up, you get a very solid product for your money that does its job well and you don’t have to dig too deep into your wallet for it. Moreover, with Arctic’s current anniversary promotion, this is an absolutely irresistible offer and so at the time of writing this review, the Smart Buy! award is an absolute must.