There’s no denying the extreme performance that the Freezone delivers. It cools your processor down below room temperature, something that even watercooling can’t do.
This extreme performance does come at a price, and not just the four Franklins you fork out. The unit is extremely noisy at its highest setting, sounding much like a jet engine. At the other extreme (the lowest setting), the Freezone performs worse than air-cooling! There isn’t really much point trying to find a happy medium between cooling and noise, because that happy medium is the same performance you get with a good air-cooled heatsink (like the Zalman CNPS-9700 NT). Why would you spend $400 on a unit only to throttle it to the same performance as a $50 heatsink?
Also, the Freezone is “expensive” in that it consumes energy to dissipate heat. The Freezone can cool up to 175W of heat, but adds another 60W of heat to do the job: that’s 235W of heat that you’re spewing into your room. Our test lab was noticably warmer than usual with the Freezone installed, so that is another thing to keep in mind.
In reality, you either leave the Freezone on full-blast, or don’t bother installing it. If you’re a gamer and live at LAN parties, then you won’t notice the noise, as you always have headphones on, or have speakers blasting away, but you’ll be the envy of all your geek friends. If you run an overclocked workstation, then you most likely have other computers polluting the room, anyway. You really have to make the choice if the extra noise will bother you. If noise is of no concern, then the CoolIT Freezone is the best-performing CPU cooler you can buy without a compressor or a bottle of liquid nitrogen.
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