Now, getting back to that uneven copper base plate that is route of this heatsinks' troubles. To discover the Freezer 64 LP's true thermal performance potential, we dropped it into a milling machine and took the copper base down a fraction of a millimeter. Only enough metal was removed to even out the surface, and then the heatsink was retested. This time around there was scarcely any thermal compound left between heatsink and the synthetic CPU die, and the recorded temperatures were a full 12.7°C cooler. With a proper flat copper base, Arctic Cooling's low profile heatsink ran at par with the stock socket 939 AVC Z7U3301001 heatsink.

Or put another way, after milling the copper base of the Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 LP heatsink so it was flat, allowing it to actually make good contact with the surface of the CPU test die, the rise above ambient temperature dropped to 32.6°C. A thermal value of this level with just 42.6 dBA noise is certainly acceptable, and makes the Freezer 64 LP a useful low profile media center thermal solution.

Bottom line, the Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 LP heatsink has the potential to yield acceptable thermal results with little noise. However, in the state that Frostytech received this heatsink for testing, the most critical component of the Freezer 64 LP heatsink was poorly manufactured and subsequently rendered the entire heatsink unsatisfactory.

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