Arctic Freezer 33 TR

[testman78]

Introduction

Our first CPU cooler review of 2018 and it's the Arctic Freezer 33 TR. The Freezer 33 TR builds upon ARCTIC's Freezer 33 series cooler. It's basically the same heatsink with a longer base that accommodates Threadripper's rectangular chip, as well as Intel?s big, high-power processors, such as the Skylake-X line. The design changes to the Freezer 33 TR allow ARCTIC to bump the cooler's recommended TDP to 200 watts (up from 150 watts on the Freezer 33) with a maximum cooling capacity of 320 watts.



Specifications.




Packaging & Contents

The packaging itself is really sturdy made of roughly 1mm thick corrugated cardboard it's able to withstand being squeezed with quite a bit of force which means you are going to be very unlucky to have it damaged in transit. ARCTIC's black and red retail packaging shows a large image of the cooler and fan as well as highlighting the 10-year warranty.



Around the back, we have images as you would find on the product web page highlighting the improved compatibility as well as the benefits of the included Arctic F12 fan. On the side of the box, we see the specifications and contents list as well as multi-lingual information.



In addition to the mounting material, decoupling rubbers and a second pair of fan brackets for a push-pull configuration with two fans are included. What's missing is a guide - it's only available online at Arctic. A small pouch of ARCTIC's MX-4 thermal compound is included and has plenty of capacity for multiple uses, though we wouldn't recommend using the opened pouch much after first being opened.




A Closer Look

Outside of the packaging, we see that the Freezer 33 TR features a matte black finish on the entirety of the cooler itself. From the cooling fins to the heatpipes, the cooler has a very "stealth" look, aside from the splash of color from the fans. With the fan out of the way, we get a good look at the cooling fins that surround the heatpipes. There are not crazy fin shapes with the Freezer 33 TR, just standard, rectangular fins up and down the cooler, save for the top fin that has a bit of a stamped design to it, in addition to the heatpipes protruding.



When assembled with the fan, the Arctic Freezer 33 TR is simple and unintrusive looking.



Adding a bit of color are 120mm fan with his red rings and rubber pads(black and white scheme is also available).



The Arctic Freezer 33 TR is equipped with four 6mm copper heatpipes, that pass through the fin aluminium heatsink tower.



49 cooling fins made of aluminum transfer the heat to the air.Those fins are claimed to create micro vortices that boost the airflow and circulate it around the heatpipes.



It comes with four U-shaped heat pipes that sit directly atop of the CPU rather than being enclosed in their own copper block which should go a long way to effectively dissipating the heat from lightweight CPU tasks even when the fan isn't operating.



The base of the cooler also features the black coloring found on the rest of the cooler. On each side of the base is a threaded hole for attaching the included mounting brackets for both Intel and AMD setups.



The base of the Arctic Freezer 33 TR is a direct connect base, meaning there isn't a cover plate providing a flat surface for your thermal paste and CPU mating surfaces. Direct contact CPU coolers are our preference, though only because they cut out the middleman, so to speak. The surface is finished to a very high standard and we found zero flaws or imperfections.The shiny bit isn't so shiny due to the lack of a contact plate, but that's ok for this type of cooler.



The fan has nine blades which can spin between 200 and 1,800 RPM, controlled via PWM. The fan/s only require a single fan header to power them, as a 4-pin splitter is included.



The F12 fan's cable is adequately braided and features a splitter to allow you to fit an additional fan to the same motherboard header.





Installation Process

Although the Freezer 33 TR is mainly advertised as a thread-ripper cooler, it is by no means only for sockets TR4 and SP3 sockets. In addition, AM4 CPUs and even Intel CPUs with headers LGA 2066 and 2011-3 (Square ILM) can be cooled. Installing the Freezer 33 TR was a very simple process.



Screw the brackets into the baseplate, then, with the motherboard in between, screw the cooler onto the backplate, and it really was that straightforward. Being such a narrow and light cooler helped when it came to fitting but there's not much more to that story, it took just a few minutes and was the least fiddly installation I've gone through since attaching the last stock heatsink.




Installed - Memory Clearance


Even with large heatshink rams installed there's still plenty of clearance between the rams and the fan.Mission accomplished.




Test System & Methology

Test System:

Cpu:AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X
Motherboard:ASRock Fatal1ty X399 Professional Gaming
Memory:G. Skill Trident Z RGB F4 - 3866 C 18 Q - 32 GTZR
Graphics Card: Sapphire HD 6970
Power Supply: Antec HCG 750W
Storage Drive: 3TB Seagate Barracuda
Boot Drive: Ocz Vector 480GB
Chassis: Dimastech Bench Table Easy V2.5





Software:

AIDA64
CPUID HW Monitor 1.23
CPUID CPU-Z 1.65

I am testing the performance as follows:

AIDA64 is run for 10 minutes and then the average maximum temperatures as recorded by CPUID HWMonitor are noted.The average temperature across the four cores is taken on our quad core processor.Celsius temperatures are used and i keep the ambient at 22 (+/- 1) degrees for all testing.Celsius temperatures should correct for any marginal ambient differences between 21-23 degrees.Acoustic measurements are taken 10cm horizontally away from the CPU cooler with the VGA fan disabled,hard drive in idle and power supply isolated. These are taken at desktop idle and AIDA64 load.The cooling performance tests are run at overclocked 4.0GHz/1.38V settings.Voltages are fixed to prevent inaccuracy between comparisons.Each test is repeated 3 times with 3 remounts for consistency of results



Temperature

First we checked the temperature during the stress test during the rated operation of the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X.All OK here.



Furthermore, we checked the temperature during the stress test when manually overclocking the CPU core clock to all the cores 4.0 GHz, 1.38 V.I am very surprised by the Arctic Freezer 33 TR and its performance during this test.




Noise Level

The sound level of the cooler is quite reasonable. The included fan can drive down to only a couple of hundred revolutions per minute, so you can get a virtually silent system if you set things right.




Conclusion

Honestly, I did not think that a heat pipe cooler would be sufficient to cool down a 180w processor with 16 cores stressed. Well, Arctic proofed me wrong here today. You probably will already have noticed it, but the Arctic Freezer 33 TR managed to cool better than the Kraken X40 LCS cooler. That's impressive, but also wasn't a very likely thing to happen. Here's my thought on that, it's the full cover heat block on the Arctic cooler that draw every Watt of heat they can deal with until they run out of capacity. Even tweaked with 16 cores at 100% stress / 1.38V the Arctic Freezer 33 TR managed to stay one degree cooler compared to that Kraken X40 LCS unit. Now of course, once you go pro with liquid cooling and bigger radiators, the dynamics will shift. But none-the-less this was very impressive to see. The all-black design of the cooling tower is a very nice look, and the build quality was great. The four 6mm heatpipes come in direct contact with the CPU heatspreader, which is a great heat-transfer design, though we would have liked to see a bit more of a polished finish to the base. The 120mm fan that sit on the cooling tower provide a good amount of airflow across the cooling fins, and his rubber mounting pads knock out any vibration buzzing that might come from a different type of fan.



If you plan on building an AMD Ryzen Threadripper or EPYC platform and don’t plan on going crazy with an overclock the Arctic Freezer 33 TR provide outstanding performance and cost under €40. With the ability to even outperform some AIO liquid coolers on the market and still allow for board space, you would be hard pressed to find a better tower cooler option in this range with this combination of performance, style, and operating noise levels.