Introduction

A quiet serene desktop workstation or a performance pixel churning cooling mammoth? Two extremes of the PC cooling world I know, my point being, can a balance be maintained between them?

My current computer has a huge Thermalright XP-90 heatsink and 92mm fan cooling the CPU with an additional 3 80mm case fans. Which as you can imagine isn’t the quietest. But because I always use headphones on and can sleep through the noise when left on overnight I don’t see a need for change. But for some people sound is everything the slightest hum is an assault on their ears.

So for most people I believe they wish to maintain stability and have moderate to high end components while still keeping a reasonable level of noise. This is where my article comes in. In this review I am going to look over Arctic’s Alpine 64. I believe this to be cooling with enough performance to handle all CPUs of the current time while maintaining a reasonable amount of noise. I will be testing its cooling performance against the huge performance monster of Thermalright’s XP-90 and the stock AMD cooler.

A little about Arctic Cooling

ARCTIC COOLING is a private owned company founded in 2001 with headquarters in Switzerland, offices in Hong Kong and with production facilities in Asia. The team of ARCTIC COOLING insists o­n international young highly educated people with business, technical and communicational skills. The attitude to work is based o­n the Swiss innovative spirit and adheres to the high Swiss standard recognized internationally. This striving for excellence is integrated in all processes and is a matter of course. ARCTIC COOLING's core competencies are multifarious such as systematic noise reduction, copper and aluminum heatsinks, customizing of thermal solutions, “Just-in-time” fan manufacturing, Ceramic Bearing, Multiple Signal Output / BIOS interface and low noise Fan Blade Design.

Features

Specifications

All AMD Sempron, Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 FX CPUs
AMD Athlon X2 up to 3800+

Heatsink dimension: 78 (L) x 98 (W) x 56 (H) mm
Fan dimension: 113 (L) x 101 (W) x 47.2 (H) mm
Cooler dimension: 113 (L) x 101 (W) x 91.7 (H) mm
Fan Speed: 2000 RPM
Air Flow: 36 CFM
Bearing: Fluid Dynamic Bearing
Weight: 486 g