Arctic Freezer 11 LP review

Performance Analysis

Our test system uses an Intel Core i7-2600K that has been overclocked to 4.1GHz with a vcore of 1.325V, but despite this, the Arctic Freezer 11 LP was till far from falling over. It's delta T of 61°C is 12°C cooler than the reference cooler and only 10°C or so off the pace of some full tower coolers. This equated to a CPU temperature of about 85°C. That's pretty toasty. but this is with all eight cores of our overclocked and overvolted CPU under 100% load - not a likely scenario with a system that requires a low-profile cooler.


Noise-wise the 92mm fan proved to be very quiet indeed at idle, with just a mildly discernible movement of air when under load as the fan span up to full speed. Of course, with the fan pointing downwards, your VRMs and chipset will be getting some welcome airflow too, which is an added bonus.


Conclusion
At less than £18, the Arctic Freezer 11 LP is a cheap and easy way to get a unit that's quieter and better-performing than the reference cooler, if you're still using one. This is unlikely (well we hope it is) if you're PC is a tower with an overclocked CPU. This is a low-profile cooler that's designed to make the most of tight situations where it's simply not possible to use a tower cooler, and you should be using/planning to buy the latter if you have the space.

Using the reference cooler in an HTPC or mini-ITX build isn't uncommon; it does the job and as the system probably won't see 100 per cent load put on its CPU more than once or twice in its lifetime, it will be fairly quiet too. In this situation, the Arctic Freezer 11 LP excels as it's far quieter than the LGA1155 reference cooler we used, but it knocked spots of its cooling performance too.

The fact it coped well with our overclocked high-end Sandy Bridge CPU is an impressive feat, although the temperature may well be a bit higher in a smaller case. That said, our test system only uses one 120mm fan for an exhaust - not totally dissimilar to a lot of mini-ITX and HTPC cases (in fact some have much better airflow). As we mentioned on our testing page, we aim to do more in the way of reviews of small coolers, cases and motherboards.

Until we start churning out this content, though, the Arctic Freezer 11 LP is a capable low-profile cooler if you're planning on buying/making/modding a dinky system. If it can cope with an overclocked Core i7-2600K, then anything less toasty than this will be a piece of cake.