Date:
Friday , May 19, 2000
Author:
Kyle Bennett
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Agilent ArctiCooler for Socket 370

Have you not heard about the ArctiCooler? It is the latest offering from a Hewlett Packard company by the name of Agilent. I am not sure what Agilent does outside of coolers, but we are really not worried about that now.

Agilent has been claiming to enter the CPU cooling game and do it better, faster, and cheaper than the competition. (Well I actually made up the cheap part, but it did sound good.) Agilent has finally delivered and given the Hard|OCP the honor of cranking up the first one for review on the Net. We started to just do a review of the ArctiCooler itself, then we decided we needed to get a few others involved to make it really fun.

We have "worked with" Hewlett Packard and their ArctiCooler guys for a while now and they have been promising big things. If you remember the "Panaflo Orbs" (reviewed here) we started seeing show up last year, well, they were the brains behind that. In the last year they decided they wanted to get into the retail heatsink and fan (HSF) biz. Their first offering was a cooler for the Xeon called a Snowleopard, but since many of us don't have, need or want Xeons, we have not ever seen these.

That is all the history lesson you get, on to the here and now. This is where we are today as compared to yesterday. As usual, all of these photos are clickable for a larger view.

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On the right we have the much younger and slimmer ArctiCooler CA compared to the older, larger and heavier Panaflo Orb of yesterday. Still based on the same design concept except we see the obvious modifications as well as the material differences you can't see.

The new ArctiCooler CA is designed specifically to work with FC-PGA CPUs better know as Flip Chips. Agilent is touting that the current CA spec will work for Flip Chips as fast as 1.4GHz. From talking with them it sounds as if they know this for a fact and it is not just a guess.

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This is the cooler in all it's glory. Pretty tame looking piece of equipment. No fancy turning locks for seating it, low gloss finish and an overall very small unit. If you are wondering about the EXACT SPECS you can find them right HERE. We are gonna cover pretty much everything you need to know about this unit in simple terms along the way. One thing we will rip from their site is a good explanation of how this thing works.

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The ArctiCooler realizes the full potential of air-cooling by achieving 2-pass heat exchange. It does this in the following way:

A solid conical base provides high velocity airflow through the heat sink and exceptional heat conduction from a small heat source (the processor) to the fins.

Two-pass heat exchange occurs as the air flowing into the top and out the bottom of the ArctiCooler creates a partial vacuum, which draws air in from the sides. The air coming in from the sides cools the fins as it comes in, and cools again as it exits: 2-pass heat exchange.

Angled fins (optional feature) provide additional thermal performance and lower acoustic noise.

One thing that was brought to our attention about using this unit is that it has to be "burned in". Strange for a HSF to need that but here is a quick explanation.

All of the CA's are shipped (at this time) with a thermal pad on the bottom referred to by Agilent as "Thermal Interface Material" or TIM. Well one thing we have ALWAYS FOUND TO SUCK was TIMs. Since this one seemed to be special we decided to give it a shot.