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[nextpage title=”Introduction”]

The Frio OCK is a new cooler from Thermaltake, with a tower heatsink, six heatpipes and two 130 mm fans. Let’s test it.

Keep in mind that the Frio OCK is not an upgraded version of the Thermaltake Frio, which we reviewed some time ago. Actually, they have almost nothing in common, except for the fact that they both have tower heatsinks and two fans each.

The Frio OCK box is made of cardboard, with a picture of the cooler in the front, as you see in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Package

Figure 2 shows what comes with the cooler: manual, thermal grease, and installation hardware. This hardware comes nicely packaged into a small box with a foam filling where every piece has its own place.

Figure 2: Accessories

In Figure 3, you can see the Thermaltake Frio OCK. By the way, OCK stands for "Overclocking King."

Figure 3: The Thermaltake Frio OCK

This cooler is discussed in detail in the following pages.

[nextpage title=”The Thermaltake Frio OCK”]

Figure 4 shows the front of the cooler, where a 130 mm fan with semitransparent blades forces the air into the heatsink.

Figure 4: Front view

Figure 5 shows the side of the cooler. The heatsink is barely visible under the plastic cover.

Figure 5: Side view

Figure 6 illustrates the back side of the cooler, where the second fan extracts the air from the heatsink. Both fans have only one power connector, which has three pins. It also has a small potentiometer where you can adjust the rotation speed.

Figure 6: Rear view

Figure 7 presents the top of the cooler. Here you can see the plastic cover, which has a transparent blue window at the center.

Figure 7: Top view

[nextpage title=”The Thermaltake Frio OCK (Cont’d)”]In Figure 8 you see the base of the Frio OCK. It is smooth but it doesn’t have a mirror-like aspect.

Figure 8: Base

Figure 9 reveals the cover off the heatsink. It can be removed just by pulling it from the sides. The fans are screwed to this cover.

Figure 9: Cover with fans

By removing that cover, you can see the heatsink. It resembles the Prolimatech Megahalems heatsink, with two independent towers, as you can view in Figures 10 and 11. It’s not a bad thing to mimic a champion design, is it?

Figure 10: Heatsink

Figure 11: Heatsink

[nextpage title=”Installation”]

Figure 12 shows the cooler base with clips attached to it and, in Figure 13, you see the backplate and the screws that go on the solder side of the motherboard.

 

Figure 12: Clips installed

Figure 13: Backplate and screws

After placing the backplate and the screws on the solder side of the motherboard, you need to install four plastic spacers and two metallic holders on the component side, as you can see in Figure 14.

Figure 14: Holding system installed

Then, screw the heatsink to the holders.

Figure 15: Heatsink installed

Finally, slip the cover over the heatsink and connect the fans to the motherboard.

Figure 16: Installed in our system

[nextpage title=”How We Tested”]

We tested the cooler with a Core i7-860 CPU (quad-core, 2.8 GHz), which is a socket LGA1156 processor with a 95 W TDP (Thermal Design Power). In order to get higher thermal dissipation, we overclocked it to 3.3 GHz (150 MHz base
clock and 22x multiplier), keeping the standard core voltage (Vcore), which was the maximum stable overclock we could make with the stock cooler. Keep in mind that we could have raised the CPU clock more, but to include the stock cooler in our comparison, we needed to use this moderate overclock.

We measured noise and temperature with the CPU idle and under full load. In order to get 100% CPU usage in all threads, we ran Prime 95 25.11 with the "In-place Large FFTs" option. (In this version, the software uses all available threads.)

We compared the tested cooler to the Intel stock cooler with a copper base (included with the CPU), as well as with other coolers. Note that in the past, we tested coolers with a socket LGA775 CPU, and we retested some "old" coolers with this new methodology. This means you can find different values in older reviews than the values you will read in the next page. Every cooler was tested with the thermal compound that accompanies it.

Room temperature measurements were taken with a digital thermometer. The core temperature was read with the SpeedFan program (available from the CPU thermal sensors), using an arithmetic average of the core temperature readings. During the tests, the left panel of the case was open.

The sound pressure level (SPL) was measured with a digital noise meter, with its sensor placed 4" (10 cm) from the fan. We turned off the case and video board cooler fans so they wouldn’t interfere with the results. This measurement is only for comparison purposes, because a precise SPL measurement needs to be made inside an acoustically insulated room with no other noise sources, which isn’t the case here.

Hardware Configuration

• Processor: Core i7-860
• Motherboard: Gigabyte P55A-UD6
• Memory: 2 GB Markvision (DDR3-1333/PC3-10700 with 9-9-9-22 timings), configured at 1,200 MHz
• Hard disk: Seagate Barracuda XT 2 TB
• Video card: Zotac GeForce GTS 250
• Video resolution: 1680×1050
• Video monitor: Samsung Syncmaster 2232BW Plus
• Power supply: Seventeam ST-550P-AM
• Case: 3RSystem L-1100 T.REX Cool

Operating System Configuration

• Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit

Software Used

• Prime95
• SpeedFan

Error Margin

We adopted a 2 °C error margin, meaning temperature differences below 2 °C are considered irrelevant.

[nextpage title=”Our Tests”]

The table below presents the results of our measurements. We repeated the same test on all coolers listed below. Each measurement was taken with the CPU at idle and at full load. In the models with a fan supporting PWM, the motherboard controlled the fan speed according to core load and temperature. On coolers with an integrated fan controller, the fan was set at the minimum speed on the idle test and at full speed on the full load test.

		Idle Processor			Processor at Full Load
Cooler	Room Temp.	Noise	Speed	Core Temp.	Noise	Speed	Core Temp.
Intel stock (socket LGA1156)	14 °C	44 dBA	1700 rpm	46 °C	54 dBA	2500 rpm	90 °C
Cooler Master Hyper TX3 G1	14 °C	47 dBA	2050 rpm	33 °C	56 dBA	2900 rpm	62 °C
Zalman CNPS10X Extreme	14 °C	45 dBA	1400 rpm	27 °C	53 dBA	1950 rpm	51 °C
Thermaltake Silent 1156	14 °C	44 dBA	1200 rpm	38 °C	49 dBA	1750 rpm	69 °C
Noctua NH-D14	14 °C	49 dBA	1250 rpm	27 °C	49 dBA	1250 rpm	53 °C
Zalman CNPS10X Performa	14 °C	46 dBA	1500 rpm	28 °C	52 dBA	1950 rpm	54 °C
Prolimatech Megahalems	14 °C	40 dBA	750 rpm	27 °C	60 dBA	2550 rpm	50 °C
Thermaltake Frio	14 °C	46 dBA	1450 rpm	27 °C	60 dBA	2500 rpm	50 °C
Prolimatech Samuel 17	14 °C	40 dBA	750 rpm	40 °C	60 dBA	2550 rpm	63 °C
Zalman CNPS8000A	18 °C	43 dBA	1400 rpm	39 °C	54 dBA	2500 rpm	70 °C
Spire TherMax Eclipse II	14 °C	55 dBA	2200 rpm	28 °C	55 dBA	2200 rpm	53 °C
Scythe Ninja3	17 °C	39 dBA	700 rpm	32 °C	55 dBA	1800 rpm	57 °C
Corsair A50	18 °C	52 dBA	1900 rpm	33 °C	52 dBA	1900 rpm	60 °C
Thermaltake Jing	18 °C	44 dBA	850 rpm	34 °C	49 dBA	1300 rpm	60 °C
GlacialTech Alaska	18 °C	43 dBA	1150 rpm	36 °C	51 dBA	1600 rpm	60 °C
Deepcool Gamer Storm	18 °C	43 dBA	1100 rpm	35 °C	48 dBA	1600 rpm	62 °C
Corsair A70	26 °C	56 dBA	1900 rpm	40 °C	56 dBA	1900 rpm	65 °C
Deepcool Ice Blade Pro	23 °C	45 dBA	1200 rpm	38 °C	52 dBA	1500 rpm	64 °C
AC Freezer 7 Pro Rev. 2	23 °C	47 dBA	1750 rpm	44 °C	51 dBA	2100 rpm	77 °C
Corsair H70	27 °C	60 dBA	1900 rpm	37 °C	60 dBA	1900 rpm	61 °C
Zalman CNPS9900 Max	27 °C	55 dBA	1600 rpm	38 °C	58 dBA	1750 rpm	63 °C
Arctic Cooling Freezer 11 LP	25 °C	45 dBA	1700 rpm	51 °C	49 dBA	1950 rpm	91 °C
CoolIT Vantage	26 °C	60 dBA	2500 rpm	37 °C	60 dBA	2500 rpm	62 °C
Deepcool Ice Matrix 600	25 °C	46 dBA	1100 rpm	41 °C	53 dBA	1300 rpm	69 °C
Titan Hati	26 °C	46 dBA	1500 rpm	40 °C	57 dBA	2450 rpm	68 °C
Arctic Cooling Freezer 13	27 °C	49 dBA	1950 rpm	41 °C	53 dBA	2300 rpm	70 °C
Noctua NH-C14	26 °C	52 dBA	1300 rpm	37 °C	52 dBA	1300 rpm	61 °C
Intel XTS100H	26 °C	49 dBA	1200 rpm	42 °C	64 dBA	2600 rpm	68 °C
Zalman CNPS5X SZ	23 °C	52 dBA	2250 rpm	38 °C	57 dBA	2950 rpm	69 °C
Thermaltake SlimX3	21 °C	50 dBA	2700 rpm	46 °C	50 dBA	2750 rpm	99 °C
Cooler Master Hyper 101	21 °C	50 dBA	2600 rpm	38 °C	57 dBA	3300 rpm	71 °C
Antec Kühler H2O 620	19 °C	52 dBA	1400 rpm	34 °C	55 dBA	1400 rpm	58 °C
Arctic Cooling Freezer 13 Pro	20 °C	46 dBA	1100 rpm	36 °C	49 dBA	1300 rpm	62 °C
GlacialTech Siberia	22 °C	49 dBA	1400 rpm	34 °C	49 dBA	1400 rpm	61 °C
Evercool Transformer 3	18 °C	46 dBA	1800 rpm	33 °C	51 dBA	2250 rpm	65 °C
Zalman CNPS11X Extreme	20 °C	51 dBA	1850 rpm	34 °C	56 dBA	2050 rpm	61 °C
Thermaltake Frio OCK	15 °C	44 dBA	1000 rpm	27 °C	64 dBA	2200 rpm	51 °C

In the graph below, at full load you can see how many degrees Celsius hotter the CPU core is than the air outside the case. The lower this difference, the better is the performance of the cooler.

 

[nextpage title=”Main Specifications”]

The main specifications for the Thermaltake Frio OCK CPU cooler include:

• Application: Sockets 775, 1155, 1156, 1366, AM3, AM2+, and AM2 processors
• Dimensions: 5.6 x 5.4 x 6.2 inches (143 x 136.8 x 158.4 mm) (W x L x H)
• Fins: Aluminum
• Base: Nickel-plated copper
• Heat-pipes: Six nickel-plated copper heatpipes
• Fan: Two 130 mm fans
• Nominal fan speed: 2.100 rpm
• Fan air flow: 121 cfm
• Maximum power consumption: 14.4 W
• Nominal noise level: 48 dBA
• Weight: 2.41 lbs (1,093 kg)
• More information: https://thermaltakeusa.com
• Average price in the US*: USD 75.00

* Researched at Newegg.com on the day we published this review.

[nextpage title=”Conclusions”]

The Thermaltake Frio OCK is a real winner, which has achieved a performance level that equals the best air coolers we have tested so far, including the Thermaltake Frio, which is a completely different cooler, despite its name.

Although it is very loud at full speed, it has a small potentiometer that controls the fans, allowing you to reduce the noise (at the cost of a little performance, of course). The cover that holds the fans is a great idea, being easy to remove and reinstall, which helps a lot if you have the habit of cleaning your system periodically.

Speaking of the fans, they are loud for a reason. They have a big airflow, which can be easily felt just by putting your hand behind the cooler.

The Thermaltake Frio OCK is a great cooler, beautiful, easy to install, costs less than most of its competitors, and shows a stunning performance, deserving the Hardware Secrets Golden Award.