360° View - Arctic Cooling Freezer A30 Heatsink Information on Frostytech's test methodology is available here.
The 120mm PWM fan spins at 1350-400RPM and draws power from a standard 4-pin PWM motherboard fan header. Four 8mm diameter copper heatpipes rise up through 117mm worth of raw aluminum fins. Each aluminum fin measures 0.5mm thick and is spaced ~2.0mm apart. The heatpipes are alternatively offset ~3mm to break up the line and spaced 80mm on center.
Arctic Cooling's Freezer A30 heatsink stands 162mm tall, the first fin is elevated 36mm above the CPU socket. The four copper heatpipes are positioned side by side at the base and swaged into the 10mm thick aluminum base plate.
The exposed copper heatpipe base of the Arctic Cooling Freezer A30 measures ~48x37mm in size and is supplied with a small tube of thermal compound. From the top we can better see how the heatpipes are slightly offset to break up the row. Heatpipes are positioned in the region of highest airflow from the fan.

Base Finish and Flatness

Flipping a heatsink over to inspect the business end is often a simple indicator of overall cooler quality. More practically speaking, a heatsink is in many ways only as effective as the contact it makes with the processor - the flatter and smoother the better. Base finish is one of the criteria that Frostytech measure in the course of evaluating heatsinks, and it involves two distinct aspects. Surface Finish is the first; this is calculated with the aid of Surface Roughness Comparator that has a cross section of common machine surface finishes and their numerical surface roughness equivalents in microinches. The second is Surface Flatness. This is tested with an engineers straight edge or proven flat surface, in two axis.

The base of the Arctic Cooling Freezer A30 heatsink has a smooth machined finish which is perfectly flat in both axis. The four heatpipes are flush with one another. Surface roughness is approximately 8 microinches.

Next up, Frostytech's heatsink sound level measurements...