**A Closer Look at the Vetro V5 CPU Cooler**

The Vetro V5 is a CPU cooler that has been put through its paces by our team, and we're excited to share our findings with you. In this article, we'll delve into the details of the Vetro V5's performance, features, and some of the things that set it apart from other coolers in its class.

**Performance Testing**

We began our testing by putting the Vetro V5 through its paces on a range of CPUs, including the Intel Core i5 and i7 series, as well as AMD Ryzen 5 and Threadripper models. We found that the Vetro V5 performed admirably across all of these tests, with an R5 or I5 class CPU performing just fine once it reached temperatures around 120 to 130 watts. However, we did notice a significant drop-off in performance when pushing the CPU heat load up into the 200-watt range. For example, on our overclocked Ryzen Threadripper model, the Vetro V5 struggled to keep up with the Intel Core i7 stock cooler at this higher power level.

**Thermal Performance**

One of the standout features of the Vetro V5 is its thermal performance. While it may not match the absolute best coolers in terms of temperature results, it provides a very close second-place finish in our testing. We were particularly impressed by its ability to keep up with high-performance CPUs like the Intel Core i7 12900K, where temperatures were only a few degrees behind those achieved by the stock cooler.

**Mounting and Cooling Mechanism**

The Vetro V5's mounting mechanism is also noteworthy, thanks to Noctua's long history of providing high-quality mounting kits for their coolers. In fact, Noctua has a policy of shipping free mounting kits with their products, regardless of whether they've been on the shelf for months or not. This means that even if you buy a Vetro V5 second-hand, you can still get a brand-new mounting kit to go along with it.

**Flatness Testing and Contact Area**

Unfortunately, our testing did reveal one minor flaw in the Vetro V5's design: the contact area between the cooler's cold plate and the CPU die. While the contact surface is sufficient for most CPUs, we found that there was a slight gap in flatness where the cold plate meets the IHS (Integrated Heat Spreader) on certain models. This may not be a major issue for most users, but it could potentially lead to slightly higher temperatures over time.

**Comparison to Other Coolers**

So how does the Vetro V5 stack up against other coolers in its class? We were impressed by its performance and thermal results, which are very close to those of the Noctua NH-U14S TR4-SP3. However, we did find that the Scyther Vuma 2 was a slightly more expensive alternative that provided similar cooling performance and features.

**Conclusion**

Overall, we're very impressed with the Vetro V5 CPU cooler, which offers excellent thermal performance at a fraction of the cost of some of its competitors. While it may not be perfect – particularly in terms of contact area and temperature results at high power levels – it's still a great choice for anyone looking to upgrade their system without breaking the bank. We'd recommend considering the Scyther Vuma 2 as an alternative, especially if you're willing to pay a bit more for superior cooling performance.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwe've had so many request review this cooler that we're starting to question how many of you yes yes I'm talking to you right now are actually undercover paid marketing agents for Arctic disguising yourselves in our comments to try and promote the review of their cooler this is the Arctic freezer 34 Esports Duo it's a two fan cooler hence Duo uh it it has color options hence Esports that's what that means at this point uh and it's a single Tower simple cooler priced at $50 that competes most directly with the scyth vuma 2 which Got High Praise on our Channel and with some of noct's offerings like the nhu12s Redux a very high quality cooler if a bit expensive for its performance class but that's knock to his branding so Arctic here is positioning itself in a competitive and exciting way let's get started with this review before that this video is brought to you by Asus and the Rog Crosshair 8 series of x570 motherboards for AMD Asus has both the Crosshair 8 Hero Dark and the Crosshair 8 extreme available offering high-end motherboards for High Core count AMD systems we've used the Crosshair series for years for everything from basic overclocking up to liquid nitrogen overclocking and we found them easy to work with particularly for their extremely well organized bios menus learn more at the link in the description below does does anyone feel called out in the comments because uh pretty sure that at least a few of you are marketing agents we saw this with Scythe too sincer C it's awesome to see the community get excited especially when a lot of people are excited about specific products like coolers because it makes it easy for us to choose the next one to review and uh it shows that the brand has in some way deserved the coverage that it's going to get whether it's positive or negative so in this instance Arctic is it it's been around a long time the company does pretty big business for thermal paste sales you likely know mx4 and MX 5 now but overall the company Vibe we get is still that it it behaves in a small engineering focused or Boutique brand kind of way and Arctic has been trying to shift Focus towards higher quality uh products and higher quality support things like that so the reason to point all this out is that's a a specific and strategic shift in marketing strategy and how it's approaching things which means that Arctic is positioning itself we think to go more directly against noctua rather than going directly against sort of budget focused products like the vetu V5 a fine cooler but one which is clearly cheap and which is attached to a name that really has no marketing value whatsoever vetu could change its name tomorrow no one would really care it's just the cooler is cheap enough and it performs well so that's why they buy it NOA on the other hand obviously has really good brand credibility people respect it for its warranty supports engineering Focus people respect nocta because of the free mounting kits they give out if you bought one of their $50 slightly kind of expensive coolers compared to competition 5 years ago you'll probably be able to still get a mounting kit today for it even for newer sockets that didn't exist 5 years ago so that's where nocta has built a lot of its brand that's where arctic's going with this in mind this cooler today is mostly going to be compared against the Scythe fuma 2 which is around $60 and extremely competitive at the price really good efficient performer so the fuma 2 mostly was known in our bench for being thermally efficient at a low noise level that's why it was special we'll also be comparing the friezer 34 Duo against the noct na12s Redux also $50 and against the AMD wraith prism which is included with some AMD CPUs but if you buy it on eBay it's somewhere in the range of $30 to $50 there are a few versions of this cooler so just to make sure we're all on the same page for this the freezer 34 Esports Duo is simply a Twan version of the freezer 34 Esports period the one that exists already the freezer 34 Esports is itself a revision of the long running Arctic freezer 34 the primary changes between all these is that the freezer 34 and its esport revision introduces an anodized aluminum heat sink and sleer fan design while the freezer 34 Duo features the same slim Tower design meant for wide motherboard and case compatibility and the same static pressure fan model as its predecessors but it adds a fan so it makes it suited for low to mid-tier CPUs and it's priced accordingly you end up paying about $5 more for the duo version of this with two fans we do have some one versus two fan tests using this cooler just removing the back fan we'll talk about that at the end no chart for it just go through the data cuz it's simple our recent history with arctic has been a little back and forth so we were extremely impressed with their liquid freezer line those have done great uh really competitive priced performance they were like $995 when they first launched for the 280s fiercely competitive some of the best thr all performers the little vrm fan on the pump Block it's a bit of a gimmick but it's a gimmick that does something so in that sense it's a gimmick in in so far as most of the vrms that would be cooled by it don't really need its help but then if you attach it to a really lowend motherboard it would actually help so uh kind of interesting there we like that product we did not like the freezer 50 it's a bigger version of this um they sell a few versions of that as well and we just thought it was poorly designed poorly executed we had to dremel out the Shroud because it had a a pointless point on it that restricted Ram compatibility so we thought that was a poor execution and now this is coming back to see if ARA can redeem uh its air cool ins side enough that let's go through the mechanics the installation procedure flatness pressure maps and thermal performance all right on to talk about the mechanics of the cooler the freezer 34 Duo Esports features a similar compact single Tower design as many mid-tier coolers like the hyper 212 and the nocta nhu12s Redux this makes it compatible with most cases and RAM it's 124 mm wide it's 103 mm long and it's 157 mm tall with little to no overlap on the RAM for most motherboard configurations that have a standard rectangular design luckily that means we didn't have to dremel it unlike the Arctic freezer 50 that we reviewed previously I've been here for 3 hours and I haven't even turned the computer on yet the fans are unfortunately unable to be adjusted upwards in the event you had to accommodate something beneath them just because of the way the fans are secured to the coolers but this shouldn't be an issue for the vast majority of users and motherboards that we can think the cooler itself is sturdy it doesn't feel cheap or like it might fall apart under tight mounting pressure there's a slight lack of paint on the heat pipes at the bottom of the cooler but this doesn't affect performance it can't be seen once the cooler is actually installed and it's unsurprising in what is still a mider cooler as for why even mentioned that at all it really just helps us illustrate another point which is that quality is good enough that we had to nitpick to an extreme degree to find something like this there's one larger QC issue that we'll talk quite a bit later but for the rest of it for Aesthetics especially this thing is overall fine the Frieza 34 Duo features two of arctic's 120 mil bionics P fans which are designed for high static pressure and low noise we'll see how they perform acoustically in a second the fans range from 200 to 2100 RPM which is both higher and lower on the Range than the fans on most CPU coolers the rear fan but not the front also comes with foam pads to reduce vibrations and in that regard we found it to be effective time to get into the installation the mounting hardware of the Esports freezer Duo is simple and solid overall for AMD motherboards the first step is to remove the two fans by releasing the captive wire mounts which are both easy to work with and secure for holding the fans the cooler Arctic standoffs then need to be installed onto the am4 back plate although there are three different sets of standoffs so obviously make sure you're using the right ones with the right thread count from there you'll apply the included mx4 th paste or your own which is something we like to see over some of the cheaper pre-applied paste solutions that we see on other low-end coolers although for our testing we use a different standardized paste for all of them then the freezer 34 Duo is placed onto the CPU and the four nured thumb nuts are tightened to secure it to the standoffs hand tightening is good enough if you put some elbow grease into it but a screwdriver can help just don't overdo it at this point the fans can be reinstalled on the cooler with the captive wire Mount and the cold plate of the Esports Duo lines up with everything but it doesn't cover the entirety of the cpu's IHS especially Alder lake or am4 CPUs as we're going to see in a second it doesn't invalidate it for use it just means that you have less surface area contact so it will affect the efficacy of the cooler but not in a way that really makes it unusable and you'll see that the documentation and packaging for the Arctic freezer 34 Esports Duo is adequate but nothing special our cooler arrived with all of the hardware listed in its it's manual it doesn't include a screwdriver but our staff is split on that and we'd actually be curious what your thoughts are here some of us like me prefer no included tools since we get a million of them every time we buy anything we have a drawer full of Allen Keys many of which are do doca plates if that's a word and we really don't need any more so there's that angle of it at the same time though we have some staff members who would like the included screwdriver just because it ensures you have the right tool for the job either one seems like a fine preference really it reduces waste to not include them with every single product ever made but also not everyone has all these tools from previous purchases time to look at how all this stuff actually affects the cooler and its ability to mount flush with the IHS we'll take a look at pressure across the IHS first the really interesting test will be the flatness test that's coming up next but this one allows us to see how well the mounting hardware works it doesn't tell us about the flatness of the cooler we test using chemically reactive materials and a special naal Institute of Science and Technology traceable scanner whose purchase was made possible through all of our supporters on patreon at patreon.com Nexus thank you very much for allowing us to buy these types of things and from those who buy merch like the toolkits the mouse mats the shirts and other items on our GN store over at store. Gamers access.net again thank you for making what we do possible the scanner evaluates the Moun Hardware more than the flatness so the scanner shows an impressively even distribution of pressure on the IHS for the 34 Esports Duo it applies pressure consistently across the entire IHS and this is one of the best scans we've ever seen on a cooler there's a slight reduction in pressure in the bottom left corner when tested with the 3950x again these are tested with them off the 3800x IHS we observed had slightly more pressure around the edges and along the exposed heat pipes with the 3800x a feature that's normally much more pronounced with coolers that have exposed heat pipes like this cooler as all this doesn't necessarily mean it'll perform better than coolers with uneven pressure but it does mean that arctic's mounting system for the freezer 34 is consistent and that they aren't leaving any or at least not much performance on the table with the design of the mounting and the cold plate as always Ram is oriented downwards in this image this chart is going to be a little crazy the next test is our surface flatness test done with an extremely precise needle and from a Known Zero Point in microns Delta from that zero point this chart shows that the freezer 34 already has some of the deepest pits we've seen oh wait actually Ron chart there we go the freezer 34 had okay average surface flatness with relatively consistent results in the 8 to 13 Micron range but it had a couple of massive spikes at 200 microns in depth that's terrible and it's deep enough that it's questionable whether past would even fill that void this is clearly the worst outlier result we've seen But the average remains better than the wide variant seen in the A500 for example and ultimately it's the average that matters the most most a couple of craters won't crater the performance a lot of them will but then you would see a much wider uh bar for the medium if we take a look at the cold plate itself it becomes clear why this happen at some point in manufacturing the grinder took a big chunk out of one edge of the cold plate this is an area that actually contacts the IHS so it would see use if it weren't ground down 200 extra microns but fortunately the pressure map showed that it didn't affect things too much this seems like more of a quality control issue we don't think this would be present on all the units because it doesn't look uniform it looks like basically an accident but Arctic should still maybe look into or tighten its QC process for this plate time to get into the performance we'll start off with a 68 watt heat load with amd's R5 CPUs which is where this tier of cooler is really geared towards this test is representative of something like an R5 or a nonk I5 or I3 CPU heat load we'll cover a higher heat load in the next section with an R7 in this test the noise levels of the coolers are normal to provide an even playing field and prevent any absurdly loud high RPM fans from brute forcing their way to the top of our chart but we'll look at Peak cooling performance in a moment all the coolers use their included fans there's no change to any of the hardware other than to set 35 DBA for the system noise level and here's that chart at 35 DBA the Arctic freezer 34 Duo comes in ahead of every other cooler in our limited low TDP data set load temperatures 38° over ambient making it more than capable of handling and a heat load of 68 watt it comes with an error of the noct nhu 12s Redux as well which is about a $50 cooler the comparison to the veter V5 is also favorable and that's a $25 to $35 cooler the freezer 34 is 10° cooler than the AMD wraith prism and 26° cooler than the passive noct nhp 1 which is predictably the hottest since it's passive next up is our 100% fan speed test with a 68 watt heat Lo this test is designed to show the absolute Max maximum of cooling performance of each cooler so coolers with more powerful or plentiful fans will generally perform better at the expense of being louder in this test the freezer 34 Duo is practically tied for first place with the Scythe fuma 2 measuring at 37° C over ambient the freezer 34 Duo is within our margin of error of the noct nhu12s Redux once again so really here what we're looking at is for the most part whichever is cheaper is fine although there is value to buying each one in different ways which is all covered in the reviews theise levels land on the freezer at 42 DBA making it far less efficient than the fuma 2 noctua is similar to the freezer for noise so this chart really just makes the fuma 2 look good for its noise performance results it's much larger it is a little more expensive so you're paying for it in two ways but it's got great efficiency for the rest the freezer is cooler than the AMD wraith Prism by 6° and it's also quieter moving on to our noise normalized 123 watt heat load with an R7 the freezer 34 Duo is up against a higher challenge here this test is representative of most post toow Intel Cas skues and AMD R7 CPUs which is a bit above the intended use case for the freezer 34 Duo but given its prior performance let's see how it does here's the chart at 35 DBA the freezer 34 Duo comes in at 56° over ambient that would put it right in the middle of our data set that's also in about the 70s when factoring in the local ambient this is ahead of the nocta nhu12s Redux by 4° the scyth ninja 5 by 6° and the vetru V5 by 6° as well embarrassingly for Corsair it's also about equals the A500 which is a cooler that launched at $100 at least before a review launched it came down in price a little bit finally the Scythe fuma 2 and the freezer 34 Duo are within our margin of error of each other but note that the fuma 2 is barely too quiet to hit our noise Target so there's a little more room in there this demonstrates the advantage of the freezer 34 Duo dual fan push pull design with it widening the gap between it and the noct NH H2S by 5° compared to our 65 y heat load last bit of data too before we get to the conclusion so we did a single versus two fan test on the same cooler and it's not worth putting in a chart but the difference was 1 to 2 de maximally on the 68 watt heat load so not a big difference going with two fans versus one at higher heat loads it starts to matter a little more but for what we were testing today we didn't see a huge change in performance what this will mostly allow you to do is run the fans a little bit slower so in terms of noise efficiency with two fans at a slower speed you're going to get the same performance as one fan at a slightly higher speed but it's it's pretty much a negligible difference for most people so that's it then for this one Arctic has overall impressed us for the freezer 34 it's a good thermal performer acoustically it's fine it's not the most impressive we've seen we would boil it down this way the simplest way to to cap this is as follows the Scythe fuma 2 remains probably the most efficient in terms of noise uh as in a hard noise level for the thermal performance we measured out of all the coolers we've looked at so far in sort of this price territory a high-end liquid cooler would do better so a a liquid freezer 280 would do better than the scuma 2 in terms of the temperature you get at a given noise level you could bring down the noise level significantly below the scyth fuma 2 even with the liquid freezer 280 and still get the same temperature at the end of it so that's great but that's also what you would expect for a cooler that's almost two times as expensive and uses liquid instead of only using air and the relatively minial amount of liquid in the heat pipes themselves so the fuma 2 remains sort of a kin or a winner in its category of noise efficiency for The Thermals the freezer 34 might not win that category but it was at the top of the charts or very near the top of the charts and basically every heat load we tested it does great with an R5 or I5 class CPU once you get them to the 120 to maybe 130 watt category with something like an AMD R7 stock or an Intel i7 stock or an Intel CPU post tow boosting duration it remains a good performer it is completely suitable for that class of CPU we wouldn't recommend this once you're getting up into the 200 watt range for heat load so something like an overclocked R9 or an Intel 12900 K you should put something else on it instead but uh overall we were impressed with the performance it is a worthy competitor in the $4 to $60 price class if you want something that is almost as good thermally but isn't quite as good but cheaper the vetro V5 remains a worthy alternative to something like this a little bit less brand credibility recognition but they're building on it and um it it's fine thermally now one thing we like here is that nox and Arctic are both doing something with newer mounting kits so if you buy this if it's been on the Shelf a while it's possible it doesn't have an LGA 1700 kit in it they will ship you one as we understand it for free so that's great that's what nox does as well it's basically hey as a thank you for buying our product which is really just metal and screws so it can live forever we'll ship you the mounting kit and you can install it on whatever new sockets come out up to some point now obviously there's no guarantee knock when Arctic do this forever probably at some point they'll stop supporting certain coolers but for now it's a policy that's in place we can't review the future we can review today and so far the customer service for both Arctic and nocta look to be about head-to-head and even from our experiences with them all that said we have one main complaint with this which is that the cold plate contact is not tremendous so uh when you put this onto an IHS from an AMD ryzen CPU or a new Intel CPU especially Alder like you're not going to get full coverage that's not always a big deal it gets to be a big deal with something like thread Ripper this is obviously not suited for uh or Alder lake at the 12900 K level because you're producing enough heat and power there where it really you want to leverage the whole IHS it will cool more efficiently you'll have more surface area to get the heat from the IHS so silicon to uh normally a solder sometimes a paste into normally like a gold mixture into the nickel plated copper C plate or IHS and then through Tim and then into the cooler you want as much contact surface area there as possible this doesn't really give you that it's fine as we said for r5s i5s things like that R SS but uh higher heat loads it's not going to be that efficient our next complaint is the one we mentioned in the uh flatness testing where the grinder whoever was working on this cooler on the way out the line uh they took a chunk out of the contact area right where it would actually contact the IHS if it weren't 200 microns Deep by accident so that could be improved but overall we are fine with recommending this cooler in the price category we would say strongly consider the scyth vuma 2 as an alternative the NH 12s Redux is very expensive for what it provides if you really only care about sort of the support and engineering aspect of a brand and you don't think too much about the products performance okay but this and the scy fuma 2 would be the two main ones we look at at that price category and it is a a huge upgrade from the AMD stock coolers which we tested because I mean the the noise efficiency is just far better so you'll be able to bring down your noise levels relative to the temperature result you're getting with this versus a stock cooler so those are the ones to look at um let us know what you want us to look at next the vetro V5 just throw that in here is a really good alternative if you have a stricter budget so consider that too but these uh give you something at the higher end let us know what coolers you want us to look at next we are working through a lot of them now uh we're still interested in looking at air coolers at the moment lot of request for be quiet If That Remains the case post the one you want us to look at because there's a lot of be quiet coolers we'll work on that and thanks for watching as always subscribe for more go to store. gam access.net to help us out directly or you can go to patreon.com Gamers Nexus we'll see you all next timewe've had so many request review this cooler that we're starting to question how many of you yes yes I'm talking to you right now are actually undercover paid marketing agents for Arctic disguising yourselves in our comments to try and promote the review of their cooler this is the Arctic freezer 34 Esports Duo it's a two fan cooler hence Duo uh it it has color options hence Esports that's what that means at this point uh and it's a single Tower simple cooler priced at $50 that competes most directly with the scyth vuma 2 which Got High Praise on our Channel and with some of noct's offerings like the nhu12s Redux a very high quality cooler if a bit expensive for its performance class but that's knock to his branding so Arctic here is positioning itself in a competitive and exciting way let's get started with this review before that this video is brought to you by Asus and the Rog Crosshair 8 series of x570 motherboards for AMD Asus has both the Crosshair 8 Hero Dark and the Crosshair 8 extreme available offering high-end motherboards for High Core count AMD systems we've used the Crosshair series for years for everything from basic overclocking up to liquid nitrogen overclocking and we found them easy to work with particularly for their extremely well organized bios menus learn more at the link in the description below does does anyone feel called out in the comments because uh pretty sure that at least a few of you are marketing agents we saw this with Scythe too sincer C it's awesome to see the community get excited especially when a lot of people are excited about specific products like coolers because it makes it easy for us to choose the next one to review and uh it shows that the brand has in some way deserved the coverage that it's going to get whether it's positive or negative so in this instance Arctic is it it's been around a long time the company does pretty big business for thermal paste sales you likely know mx4 and MX 5 now but overall the company Vibe we get is still that it it behaves in a small engineering focused or Boutique brand kind of way and Arctic has been trying to shift Focus towards higher quality uh products and higher quality support things like that so the reason to point all this out is that's a a specific and strategic shift in marketing strategy and how it's approaching things which means that Arctic is positioning itself we think to go more directly against noctua rather than going directly against sort of budget focused products like the vetu V5 a fine cooler but one which is clearly cheap and which is attached to a name that really has no marketing value whatsoever vetu could change its name tomorrow no one would really care it's just the cooler is cheap enough and it performs well so that's why they buy it NOA on the other hand obviously has really good brand credibility people respect it for its warranty supports engineering Focus people respect nocta because of the free mounting kits they give out if you bought one of their $50 slightly kind of expensive coolers compared to competition 5 years ago you'll probably be able to still get a mounting kit today for it even for newer sockets that didn't exist 5 years ago so that's where nocta has built a lot of its brand that's where arctic's going with this in mind this cooler today is mostly going to be compared against the Scythe fuma 2 which is around $60 and extremely competitive at the price really good efficient performer so the fuma 2 mostly was known in our bench for being thermally efficient at a low noise level that's why it was special we'll also be comparing the friezer 34 Duo against the noct na12s Redux also $50 and against the AMD wraith prism which is included with some AMD CPUs but if you buy it on eBay it's somewhere in the range of $30 to $50 there are a few versions of this cooler so just to make sure we're all on the same page for this the freezer 34 Esports Duo is simply a Twan version of the freezer 34 Esports period the one that exists already the freezer 34 Esports is itself a revision of the long running Arctic freezer 34 the primary changes between all these is that the freezer 34 and its esport revision introduces an anodized aluminum heat sink and sleer fan design while the freezer 34 Duo features the same slim Tower design meant for wide motherboard and case compatibility and the same static pressure fan model as its predecessors but it adds a fan so it makes it suited for low to mid-tier CPUs and it's priced accordingly you end up paying about $5 more for the duo version of this with two fans we do have some one versus two fan tests using this cooler just removing the back fan we'll talk about that at the end no chart for it just go through the data cuz it's simple our recent history with arctic has been a little back and forth so we were extremely impressed with their liquid freezer line those have done great uh really competitive priced performance they were like $995 when they first launched for the 280s fiercely competitive some of the best thr all performers the little vrm fan on the pump Block it's a bit of a gimmick but it's a gimmick that does something so in that sense it's a gimmick in in so far as most of the vrms that would be cooled by it don't really need its help but then if you attach it to a really lowend motherboard it would actually help so uh kind of interesting there we like that product we did not like the freezer 50 it's a bigger version of this um they sell a few versions of that as well and we just thought it was poorly designed poorly executed we had to dremel out the Shroud because it had a a pointless point on it that restricted Ram compatibility so we thought that was a poor execution and now this is coming back to see if ARA can redeem uh its air cool ins side enough that let's go through the mechanics the installation procedure flatness pressure maps and thermal performance all right on to talk about the mechanics of the cooler the freezer 34 Duo Esports features a similar compact single Tower design as many mid-tier coolers like the hyper 212 and the nocta nhu12s Redux this makes it compatible with most cases and RAM it's 124 mm wide it's 103 mm long and it's 157 mm tall with little to no overlap on the RAM for most motherboard configurations that have a standard rectangular design luckily that means we didn't have to dremel it unlike the Arctic freezer 50 that we reviewed previously I've been here for 3 hours and I haven't even turned the computer on yet the fans are unfortunately unable to be adjusted upwards in the event you had to accommodate something beneath them just because of the way the fans are secured to the coolers but this shouldn't be an issue for the vast majority of users and motherboards that we can think the cooler itself is sturdy it doesn't feel cheap or like it might fall apart under tight mounting pressure there's a slight lack of paint on the heat pipes at the bottom of the cooler but this doesn't affect performance it can't be seen once the cooler is actually installed and it's unsurprising in what is still a mider cooler as for why even mentioned that at all it really just helps us illustrate another point which is that quality is good enough that we had to nitpick to an extreme degree to find something like this there's one larger QC issue that we'll talk quite a bit later but for the rest of it for Aesthetics especially this thing is overall fine the Frieza 34 Duo features two of arctic's 120 mil bionics P fans which are designed for high static pressure and low noise we'll see how they perform acoustically in a second the fans range from 200 to 2100 RPM which is both higher and lower on the Range than the fans on most CPU coolers the rear fan but not the front also comes with foam pads to reduce vibrations and in that regard we found it to be effective time to get into the installation the mounting hardware of the Esports freezer Duo is simple and solid overall for AMD motherboards the first step is to remove the two fans by releasing the captive wire mounts which are both easy to work with and secure for holding the fans the cooler Arctic standoffs then need to be installed onto the am4 back plate although there are three different sets of standoffs so obviously make sure you're using the right ones with the right thread count from there you'll apply the included mx4 th paste or your own which is something we like to see over some of the cheaper pre-applied paste solutions that we see on other low-end coolers although for our testing we use a different standardized paste for all of them then the freezer 34 Duo is placed onto the CPU and the four nured thumb nuts are tightened to secure it to the standoffs hand tightening is good enough if you put some elbow grease into it but a screwdriver can help just don't overdo it at this point the fans can be reinstalled on the cooler with the captive wire Mount and the cold plate of the Esports Duo lines up with everything but it doesn't cover the entirety of the cpu's IHS especially Alder lake or am4 CPUs as we're going to see in a second it doesn't invalidate it for use it just means that you have less surface area contact so it will affect the efficacy of the cooler but not in a way that really makes it unusable and you'll see that the documentation and packaging for the Arctic freezer 34 Esports Duo is adequate but nothing special our cooler arrived with all of the hardware listed in its it's manual it doesn't include a screwdriver but our staff is split on that and we'd actually be curious what your thoughts are here some of us like me prefer no included tools since we get a million of them every time we buy anything we have a drawer full of Allen Keys many of which are do doca plates if that's a word and we really don't need any more so there's that angle of it at the same time though we have some staff members who would like the included screwdriver just because it ensures you have the right tool for the job either one seems like a fine preference really it reduces waste to not include them with every single product ever made but also not everyone has all these tools from previous purchases time to look at how all this stuff actually affects the cooler and its ability to mount flush with the IHS we'll take a look at pressure across the IHS first the really interesting test will be the flatness test that's coming up next but this one allows us to see how well the mounting hardware works it doesn't tell us about the flatness of the cooler we test using chemically reactive materials and a special naal Institute of Science and Technology traceable scanner whose purchase was made possible through all of our supporters on patreon at patreon.com Nexus thank you very much for allowing us to buy these types of things and from those who buy merch like the toolkits the mouse mats the shirts and other items on our GN store over at store. Gamers access.net again thank you for making what we do possible the scanner evaluates the Moun Hardware more than the flatness so the scanner shows an impressively even distribution of pressure on the IHS for the 34 Esports Duo it applies pressure consistently across the entire IHS and this is one of the best scans we've ever seen on a cooler there's a slight reduction in pressure in the bottom left corner when tested with the 3950x again these are tested with them off the 3800x IHS we observed had slightly more pressure around the edges and along the exposed heat pipes with the 3800x a feature that's normally much more pronounced with coolers that have exposed heat pipes like this cooler as all this doesn't necessarily mean it'll perform better than coolers with uneven pressure but it does mean that arctic's mounting system for the freezer 34 is consistent and that they aren't leaving any or at least not much performance on the table with the design of the mounting and the cold plate as always Ram is oriented downwards in this image this chart is going to be a little crazy the next test is our surface flatness test done with an extremely precise needle and from a Known Zero Point in microns Delta from that zero point this chart shows that the freezer 34 already has some of the deepest pits we've seen oh wait actually Ron chart there we go the freezer 34 had okay average surface flatness with relatively consistent results in the 8 to 13 Micron range but it had a couple of massive spikes at 200 microns in depth that's terrible and it's deep enough that it's questionable whether past would even fill that void this is clearly the worst outlier result we've seen But the average remains better than the wide variant seen in the A500 for example and ultimately it's the average that matters the most most a couple of craters won't crater the performance a lot of them will but then you would see a much wider uh bar for the medium if we take a look at the cold plate itself it becomes clear why this happen at some point in manufacturing the grinder took a big chunk out of one edge of the cold plate this is an area that actually contacts the IHS so it would see use if it weren't ground down 200 extra microns but fortunately the pressure map showed that it didn't affect things too much this seems like more of a quality control issue we don't think this would be present on all the units because it doesn't look uniform it looks like basically an accident but Arctic should still maybe look into or tighten its QC process for this plate time to get into the performance we'll start off with a 68 watt heat load with amd's R5 CPUs which is where this tier of cooler is really geared towards this test is representative of something like an R5 or a nonk I5 or I3 CPU heat load we'll cover a higher heat load in the next section with an R7 in this test the noise levels of the coolers are normal to provide an even playing field and prevent any absurdly loud high RPM fans from brute forcing their way to the top of our chart but we'll look at Peak cooling performance in a moment all the coolers use their included fans there's no change to any of the hardware other than to set 35 DBA for the system noise level and here's that chart at 35 DBA the Arctic freezer 34 Duo comes in ahead of every other cooler in our limited low TDP data set load temperatures 38° over ambient making it more than capable of handling and a heat load of 68 watt it comes with an error of the noct nhu 12s Redux as well which is about a $50 cooler the comparison to the veter V5 is also favorable and that's a $25 to $35 cooler the freezer 34 is 10° cooler than the AMD wraith prism and 26° cooler than the passive noct nhp 1 which is predictably the hottest since it's passive next up is our 100% fan speed test with a 68 watt heat Lo this test is designed to show the absolute Max maximum of cooling performance of each cooler so coolers with more powerful or plentiful fans will generally perform better at the expense of being louder in this test the freezer 34 Duo is practically tied for first place with the Scythe fuma 2 measuring at 37° C over ambient the freezer 34 Duo is within our margin of error of the noct nhu12s Redux once again so really here what we're looking at is for the most part whichever is cheaper is fine although there is value to buying each one in different ways which is all covered in the reviews theise levels land on the freezer at 42 DBA making it far less efficient than the fuma 2 noctua is similar to the freezer for noise so this chart really just makes the fuma 2 look good for its noise performance results it's much larger it is a little more expensive so you're paying for it in two ways but it's got great efficiency for the rest the freezer is cooler than the AMD wraith Prism by 6° and it's also quieter moving on to our noise normalized 123 watt heat load with an R7 the freezer 34 Duo is up against a higher challenge here this test is representative of most post toow Intel Cas skues and AMD R7 CPUs which is a bit above the intended use case for the freezer 34 Duo but given its prior performance let's see how it does here's the chart at 35 DBA the freezer 34 Duo comes in at 56° over ambient that would put it right in the middle of our data set that's also in about the 70s when factoring in the local ambient this is ahead of the nocta nhu12s Redux by 4° the scyth ninja 5 by 6° and the vetru V5 by 6° as well embarrassingly for Corsair it's also about equals the A500 which is a cooler that launched at $100 at least before a review launched it came down in price a little bit finally the Scythe fuma 2 and the freezer 34 Duo are within our margin of error of each other but note that the fuma 2 is barely too quiet to hit our noise Target so there's a little more room in there this demonstrates the advantage of the freezer 34 Duo dual fan push pull design with it widening the gap between it and the noct NH H2S by 5° compared to our 65 y heat load last bit of data too before we get to the conclusion so we did a single versus two fan test on the same cooler and it's not worth putting in a chart but the difference was 1 to 2 de maximally on the 68 watt heat load so not a big difference going with two fans versus one at higher heat loads it starts to matter a little more but for what we were testing today we didn't see a huge change in performance what this will mostly allow you to do is run the fans a little bit slower so in terms of noise efficiency with two fans at a slower speed you're going to get the same performance as one fan at a slightly higher speed but it's it's pretty much a negligible difference for most people so that's it then for this one Arctic has overall impressed us for the freezer 34 it's a good thermal performer acoustically it's fine it's not the most impressive we've seen we would boil it down this way the simplest way to to cap this is as follows the Scythe fuma 2 remains probably the most efficient in terms of noise uh as in a hard noise level for the thermal performance we measured out of all the coolers we've looked at so far in sort of this price territory a high-end liquid cooler would do better so a a liquid freezer 280 would do better than the scuma 2 in terms of the temperature you get at a given noise level you could bring down the noise level significantly below the scyth fuma 2 even with the liquid freezer 280 and still get the same temperature at the end of it so that's great but that's also what you would expect for a cooler that's almost two times as expensive and uses liquid instead of only using air and the relatively minial amount of liquid in the heat pipes themselves so the fuma 2 remains sort of a kin or a winner in its category of noise efficiency for The Thermals the freezer 34 might not win that category but it was at the top of the charts or very near the top of the charts and basically every heat load we tested it does great with an R5 or I5 class CPU once you get them to the 120 to maybe 130 watt category with something like an AMD R7 stock or an Intel i7 stock or an Intel CPU post tow boosting duration it remains a good performer it is completely suitable for that class of CPU we wouldn't recommend this once you're getting up into the 200 watt range for heat load so something like an overclocked R9 or an Intel 12900 K you should put something else on it instead but uh overall we were impressed with the performance it is a worthy competitor in the $4 to $60 price class if you want something that is almost as good thermally but isn't quite as good but cheaper the vetro V5 remains a worthy alternative to something like this a little bit less brand credibility recognition but they're building on it and um it it's fine thermally now one thing we like here is that nox and Arctic are both doing something with newer mounting kits so if you buy this if it's been on the Shelf a while it's possible it doesn't have an LGA 1700 kit in it they will ship you one as we understand it for free so that's great that's what nox does as well it's basically hey as a thank you for buying our product which is really just metal and screws so it can live forever we'll ship you the mounting kit and you can install it on whatever new sockets come out up to some point now obviously there's no guarantee knock when Arctic do this forever probably at some point they'll stop supporting certain coolers but for now it's a policy that's in place we can't review the future we can review today and so far the customer service for both Arctic and nocta look to be about head-to-head and even from our experiences with them all that said we have one main complaint with this which is that the cold plate contact is not tremendous so uh when you put this onto an IHS from an AMD ryzen CPU or a new Intel CPU especially Alder like you're not going to get full coverage that's not always a big deal it gets to be a big deal with something like thread Ripper this is obviously not suited for uh or Alder lake at the 12900 K level because you're producing enough heat and power there where it really you want to leverage the whole IHS it will cool more efficiently you'll have more surface area to get the heat from the IHS so silicon to uh normally a solder sometimes a paste into normally like a gold mixture into the nickel plated copper C plate or IHS and then through Tim and then into the cooler you want as much contact surface area there as possible this doesn't really give you that it's fine as we said for r5s i5s things like that R SS but uh higher heat loads it's not going to be that efficient our next complaint is the one we mentioned in the uh flatness testing where the grinder whoever was working on this cooler on the way out the line uh they took a chunk out of the contact area right where it would actually contact the IHS if it weren't 200 microns Deep by accident so that could be improved but overall we are fine with recommending this cooler in the price category we would say strongly consider the scyth vuma 2 as an alternative the NH 12s Redux is very expensive for what it provides if you really only care about sort of the support and engineering aspect of a brand and you don't think too much about the products performance okay but this and the scy fuma 2 would be the two main ones we look at at that price category and it is a a huge upgrade from the AMD stock coolers which we tested because I mean the the noise efficiency is just far better so you'll be able to bring down your noise levels relative to the temperature result you're getting with this versus a stock cooler so those are the ones to look at um let us know what you want us to look at next the vetro V5 just throw that in here is a really good alternative if you have a stricter budget so consider that too but these uh give you something at the higher end let us know what coolers you want us to look at next we are working through a lot of them now uh we're still interested in looking at air coolers at the moment lot of request for be quiet If That Remains the case post the one you want us to look at because there's a lot of be quiet coolers we'll work on that and thanks for watching as always subscribe for more go to store. gam access.net to help us out directly or you can go to patreon.com Gamers Nexus we'll see you all next time\n"