Thermaltake FrioOCK Preview

Thermaltake FrioOCK Preview

Manufacturer: Thermaltake

While nosing around the Thermaltake open-day for its new office in the lovely Neihu area of Taipei, we were introduced to its very latest CPU cooler, the FrioOCK.

As you can probably tell from the name, it's an upgrade to the award winning Frio CPU cooler. The FrioOCK now uses six heatpipes, increased from five, in a fatter aluminium fin-stack with slightly larger 13cm fans placed on either side. The whole design looks more 'integrated' than the original, with the fans and heatsink now firmly enveloped under more black plastic.


Despite all these extras, though, the FrioOCK is only 50g heavier than the Frio at 1,093g. Yes, that's still a kilo of CPU cooler, but thankfully it still comes with a backplate-assisted, bolted-down design. In fact, the mounting mechanism looks pretty much identical to that of the Frio, potentially giving it support for all the modern sockets: AM2, AM2+, AM3, LGA1155, LGA1156, LGA1366 and LGA775.


Unlike many of the best coolers to date, the base encases the heatpipes in an aluminium baseplate instead of exposing them directly to the CPU. However, this shouldn't be a problem, as the heatpipes appear to be firmly in place. It's also worth noting that the base isn't mirror finished, and instead has small circular machine marks on it. However, it still looked sufficiently flattened to our eyes.


What is notable is the size and layout of the heatpipes, though. the original Frio uses five fatter pipes arranged in a staggered array, versus the FrioOCK's thinner, straight six. Logic would suggest the staggered design is better because it exposes the pipes to more direct airflow, but we'll have to wait until we can give it a proper test before we know for sure.


Both the 13cm fans are tethered together and powered from a single 3-pin plug, with a separate small rheostat to change the fan speeds. In an era where virtually every motherboard has at least one 4-pin PWM-controlled fan socket, it seems strange that Thermaltake still wants us to open the case every time we fancy changing the fan-speed. From our initial observations, the fan mounting holes appear to be the same as those of a standard 120mm fan, despite the larger fan size. As such, both fans can possibly be swapped out for your own personal preference if need be, although we'll confirm this once we receive a retail sample.


Another note is that, unlike Thermaltake's usual bling-littered designs, there were no LED fans or underlighting under the blue cap at the top of the working sample. This is a pleasant change for the better, in our opinion, as case lighting should be entirely user-designed and selectable.

Let us know your initial thoughts on the FrioOCK in the forums.