Arctic’s Freezer 34 tested with Intel’s i9-13900k : Will it melt under the heat?!

Arctic is one of the most well known brands amongst PC enthusiasts, their Liquid Freezer series being one of the most popular AIOs on the market. Today we’ll be looking at one of their more entry level offerings. Arctic sent us the Freezer 34 for testing, and we’ll be giving it quite the challenge – can it handle the heat of Intel’s i9-13900K?!

Packaging

The Freezer 34 comes in a fairly small cardboard box.

Upon opening the box, you’ll see a “Thank You” pamphlet, an insert with a QR code which links to installation instructions, and below that is the parts for mounting the cooler.

Underneath the inserts and the mounting equipment is the radiator and the included fans.

And here’s a view of all of the included components, laid out on a table

Specifications

Fans

There’s more to a cooler than just it’s heat sink. The fans included have a huge impact on cooling performance and noise levels. The Freezer 34 includes BioniX P-Series fans in Push-Pull configuration. These fans have a very unique feature – fan splitters are built into them.

The way the clips connect the fans to the radiator tower is also unique, providing a more secure connection which in turn reduces fan vibration. However, it can be a bit of a pain to install the clips.

Installation

To install the Freezer 34 on a LGA 1700 system, you’ll first need to attach the standoffs to the backplate and secure them with the included O-rings. Then, press the backplate against the motherboard and secure it using the included stand-offs.

Next, secure the mounting bars to the main cooler.

Afterwards, apply thermal paste, set the cooler against the CPU, and then secure the cooler with the included thumb screws.

Finally, attach the fans and the installation is complete!

Thermal Performance

For thermal tests, we’ll be using Cinebench R23’s multi-core benchmark with power limits removed, at 150w, and at 100w.

When power limits are removed, this is an extremely thermally demanding test – in fact it’s so demanding that every cooler that I’ve tested has throttled to some extent. Because of this, we can’t benchmark this using a normal delta over ambient rating in this scenario. Instead, we’ll look at a total benchmark score.

Despite being a mid range air cooler and sustaining TJMax for the duration of this test, Arctic’s Freezer 34 does fairly well here – providing 90.8% of the performance of a high end AIO cooler for 1/3 of the price.

When more realistic power limits are enforced, the Freezer 34 handles the i9-13900K with ease.

When restricted to 150w, the Freezer 34 kept Intel’s i9-13900K under 73c (actual peak temperature), averaging 45c over ambient. Dropping the power limit to 100w results in actual temperature dropping to under 65c (actual peak temperature), averaging a chilly 31c over ambient.

How do these reduced limits impact performance?

Conclusion

Overall, Arctic’s Freezer 34 is capable of loads averaging 219w over 10 minutes when paired with Intel’s Raptor Lake i9-13900K. Increasing this to a 30 minute test drops the average power consumption cooled by 1w to 218w, showing it’s capable of sustaining the same levels of performance even under extended testing scenarios.

In most common workloads, the Freezer 34 is strong enough to run Intel’s i9-13900k without any limitations at all. For those who run high intensity workloads, the Freezer 34 will provide ~91% of the performance of a high end AIO. While I don’t have noise level numbers in this review, I can assure you it runs fairly quietly.

For most folks and the tasks they run, Arctic’s Freezer 34 is a good air cooler which provides more than enough cooling to run Raptor Lake CPUs.

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