If you’re into high performance cooling then you know the name Arctic Cooling, even the name sounds cool (pun intended). Today for review I have the Alpine64 CPU Cooler from them, it kind of turns the ideas we have of CPU coolers around 360 degrees; by that I mean normally a smooth finished heatsink base is what is mainly looked for in a CPU Cooler. The Alpine64 is a bit different, to quote from Arctic Cooling: Only with the viscosity of this MX-1 paste combined with the surface roughness of the cooler can we guarantee correct heat dissipation Now that’s odd because a heatsink base should be as smooth as possible right? Well Arctic Cooling doesn’t think it has to be, and the Alpine64 cooler proves that to be true with its’ excellent performance, read on to learn just what I mean….

Arctic Cooling Alpine64 CPU Cooler

Reviewed by: Kristofer Brozio AkA Dracos

Sponsor: Arctic Cooling

Tech Specs,Features or the Basic Info:

Alpine64 from Arctic Cooling

Specs:

Heat Sink: 78(L) x 98(W) x 56(H) mm

Fan: 113(L) x 101(W) x 47.2(H) mm

Overall Dimension: 113(L) x 101(W) x 91.7(H) mm

Rated Fan Speed: 2000 RPM

Power Consumption: 0.17 Amp.

Air Flow: 36 CFM / 62 m3/h

Weight: 486 g

Noise Level: 0.6 Sone

Thermal Resistance: 0.26C/Watt

Thermal Interface Material: Pre-applied MX-1 Paste

Warranty: 6 Years

Application:

All AMD Sempron, Athlon 64 and

Athlon 64 X2 (Socket 754, 939, AM2)

All AMD Opteron

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Features:

Patented Vibration Absorption

The four rubber connectors on the fan case act as a vibration damper to absorb the vibration of the running fan and prevent vibration transfer to the heatsink and the case.

Integrated Cooling of Voltage Converters

Air is drawn in from the top.

Some air is blown out to all four directions in order to cool the voltage converters and chipset

Extremely Quiet by Patented Fan Casing

The low speed 92 mm fan reduces the noise level to a minimum.

The patented fan holder is able to practically eliminate the typical buzzing sound of 92 mm fans

The Fluid Dynamic Bearing keeps oil inside the bearing and thus reduce friction inbetween and keep the noise level to a minimum

Noise Level

The noise level is measured in Sone (loudness) instead of dB (sound intensity).

The loudness depends upon ears response curves and tells you exactly, how bothering a certain noise is.

Thermal Compound

We ship our coolers with the ARCTIC MX-1 thermal compound. This compound hardens during the first 200h while the performance improves steadily. With heating up the paste / heatsink the process can be shortened. The performance is even from the beginning good enough to cool your CPU reliably.

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A Better Look at Things

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The first thing we look at is the packaging, the Alpine64’s box is a sleek black color with lots of info and specs all over it.

On side of the box has a nice digram of just how the Alpine64 CPU Cooler works, it explains that the fan actually pushes air out the bottom of the cooler in all four directions to also help cool any components near your CPU.

Upon open the lid of the box we are greeted with an instruction manual with the Alpine64 beneath that. The box is fairly sturdy enough to adequately protect the Alipne64 during transit.

Unpacking the contents we see that the Alpine64 sits on a protective base to protect the pre-applied thermal paste and the base itself. Arctic Cooling also included a case badge to proudly display that you are cooling your CPU with Arctic Cooling.

A closer look at the Apline64 shows us a rather cool fan, it is a partially open frame fan that allows maximum airflow to the blades and through to the Alpine64. On each side of the fan are screws, these screws are used to install the Alpine64, they are for tightening the clips to your socket mounting bracket.

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The Alpine64 is an all aluminum cooler, it has 27 fairly thick cooling fins, and it appears to be fabricated as fully a one piece design so thermal transfer is optimized.

Each side of the Alpine64 has a retention clip that attaches to the standard retention mechanism of your CPU. These clips move up and down when the screws on top are turned, you need to loosen these before installation and of course tighten them to lock to your CPU.

Just a casual look at the base and you can see that it is not smooth at all, the machining lines are clearly visible even without zooming in. This is not a mistake, as I mentioned in the introduction the roughness of the base is supposed to actually promote thermal transfer.

Attaching the macro lens to my camera we can get a nice very close and look at the pre-applied thermal paste, we can see that it is patterned with a sort of cross hatching.

The next picture is a very close and shot of the base where you can really see the roughness and pattern in the thermal paste. How well does this combination perform?

As I mentioned this whole rough base thing kind of blows all standards out the window, normally we strive for a smooth, mirror finish on the base of our CPU heatsink. There are many tutorials online to learn how to lap the base of your CPU to make it smooth, there are some companies that actually sell kits to do just that.

The Alpine64 weighs about as much as the AMD stock cooler, and is very well made.

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Installation, Testing and Comparison

Installation is very easy, you just need to loosen the screws, clips the clips onto your mounting bracket and then tighten the screws to secure the Alpine64 to your CPU. I’m using the Alpine64 with my AMD Athlon64 X2 4200+ CPU and DFI Sli-Dr motherboard for testing.

The Alpine64 does hand over the CPU mounting bracket quite a bit and comes very close to my ram, but the ram I am using is Corsair XMSPRO 3500LL and it features the extra high heatspreaders, so ‘normal’ ram should be fine. Installation was close but not touching the Corsair ram.

For testing the ambient temperature was approximately 27C, to achieve load I used Prime95 running one instance on each core of my X2 CPU for approximately 35 minutes. To get an idea of the performance I will be comparing the Alpine64 to my Corsair Nautilus 500 Liquid cooling system, and the AMD Stock CPU Cooler. One thing to note is that the Alpine64 is not made for overclocking it is made for silence and keeping your CPU cool under normal conditions.

IDLE:

Alpine64: 30-31c

Corsair: 30-31c

AMD Stock: 29-30c

LOAD:

Alpine64: 43-44c

Corsair: 38-39c

AMD Stock: 40-41c

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Not bad performance, the same temperature at idle as my Liquid cooling system, I was very surprised by this. The AMD Stock cooler is a couple degrees cooler but also a whole lot louder than the Alpine64, and when the CPU is under load the AMD cooler gets much louder while the Alpine64 does not. I couldn’t even hear a difference in the noise level when the CPU was under load.

Summary:

We have here a CPU Cooler that cools almost as well as a liquid cooling system and is virtually silent, yes there are others that cool better but at the sacrifice of listening to the whine of a loud fan. I don’t know about you but I prefer a very quiet computer, as quiet as possible actually. If you are not overclocking and you are looking for an excellent performing CPU cooler that is almost silent then you might want to consider the Alpine64 and get rid of that loud stock cooler. I was actually thinking of using the Alpine64 in my HTPC system as that is really something that needs to be as quiet as possible, it would be perfect for that.

We learned that what we think we know about CPU coolers is not quite true, sometimes a smooth mirror finish base is not what we think it is. Arctic Cooling has shown us that thermal transfer can be done very effectively with a rough based CPU Cooler. We may just have to rethink things here huh? The Alpine64 proves that smoothness isn’t everything, and silence is truly golden.

DragonSteelMods gives the Alpine64 from Arctic Cooling a 5 out of 5 score.