Arctic Cooling Announces the Freezer i11 and A11 CPU Coolers

Silence is golden; Also $40…

Jan 21, 2014 by

arctic-coolingThe heatsink artists at Arctic cooling announced a pair of new additions to their low-end CPU cooler line up in the form of the Freezer i11 and A11. As you’ve probably already guessed the i11 is the Intel compatible version and the A11 is the AMD compatible version. Both of these coolers have support for TDPs of up to 150 Watts using a three heat pipe design with an all-aluminum 45 fin radiator. Like Arctic’s previous offerings the i11/A11 come with a single 92mm fan that uses rubber mounts to reduce vibration.

Arctic Cooler box

Looking at the heat pipe setup we can see that all three of the 6mm copper heat pipes directly contact the CPU die at the unit’s base. The fan uses a fluid dynamic bearing and Arctic quotes a noise level of 0.3 Sone which means that this cooler should not be audible. The i11 and A11 both weigh in at 480 grams making them relatively light aftermarket coolers. On the Intel side Arctic is promising compatibility with Sockets 1150, 1155, 1156, and 2011.  For people with AMD chips Sockets AM2, AM2+, AM3+, FM1, and FM2 are supported.

Arctic Cooler base

According to Arctic’s testing each of these coolers will halve the full load temperatures of your CPU or APU compared to the weak in-box cooler that came with your chip. For thermal paste Arctic is also bundling its MX-4 high-performance product which has a thermal conductivity rating of 8.5 Watts per meter Kelvin which is competitive if not better than similarly priced products.

As far as we’re concerned the Arctic Freezer i11/A11 is an excellent choice of cooler for stock or mildly overclocked systems. Make no mistake this is not a top-of-range cooler, but the combination of near silence and cooling performance that Arctic has managed to assemble for a $40 asking price is hard to beat. Having used a couple of older Arctic Freezer 7 Pro units I’ve always been impressed with the quality and value that Arctic’s low-end coolers offer. The Freezer i11 and A11 look like solid continuation of that trend.

Arctic Cooler front

Arctic says that these two coolers will be available by the end of January. So if you’re starting to piece together a new build with one of AMD’s Kaveri chips the Freezer A11 is definitely worth a look.S|A

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Thomas Ryan

Author at SemiAccurate
Thomas Ryan is a freelance technology writer and photographer from Seattle, living in Austin. You can also find his work on SemiAccurate and PCWorld. He has a BA in Geography from the University of Washington with a minor in Urban Design and Planning and specializes in geospatial data science. If you have a hardware performance question or an interesting data set Thomas has you covered.