From this viewpoint you can also see very well where the heatsink plates meet the heatpipes. The contact between them is made exactly the same way as by Scythe Ninja cooler, which we have already discussed in great detail in our review called Battle of the Titans: Super Coolers from Scythe, Thermaltake and Zalman Face to Face . The contact surface between the plates and the heatpipes is the flat aluminum necks that may have been shaped like that on purpose or may have turned out like that when the preheated aluminum plates were threaded onto the heatpipes:

Note that there is a gap between the aluminum necks only where the three lower plates are bent. All the rest of the plates sit so close to one another that there is no copper heatpipe shining through anywhere.

The ends of the heatpipes at the top of the heatsink have been hermetically soldered, although not in the neatest way:

Moreover, the heatpipes bear some mechanical traces from the threaded plates that could have been left during the heatsink assembly.

The cooler footing is made of two copper plates, each about 5mm thick. The heatpipes go through these plates. The footing plates and the heatpipes are evidently soldered together, since we can clearly see alloy traces on the lower ends of the heatpipes:

Again, I have to admit that this could have been done neater. Although, the finish of the cooler sole leaves even more to be desired. It would be more correct to say that the cooler sole hasn’t been finished at all. The mechanical milling traces can be seen with a naked eye and moreover, can be even felt to the touch. I have to add here that despite the absence of any final polishing on the sole, it is ideally even: the footprint from the cooler sole on the glass that we obtained with a very thin layer of thermal paste appeared outstandingly even, without any empty spots.

The cooler sole is pre-covered with Arctic Cooling MX-1 thermal paste and a protective plastic cap:

The picture above has been taken after we removed the cooler from the system, so do not be concerned with the missing thermal interface in some spots. The Arctic Cooling’s own thermal paste was very thick, I would even say dry, and the layer was quite generous as well. After 4 days of testing this cooler with its default thermal paste we decided to replace it with our KPT-8 paste, and the improvement didn’t keep us waiting for long: the temperature dropped by 3^o C in burn mode compared with what we were seeing with the standard MX-1 thermal interface before. Maybe we couldn’t really get better results with Arctic Cooling’s authentic thermal interface because we haven’t used it long enough. According to the manufacturer’s instructions, the interface should be exploited at least for 200 hours (8 days) in order to reveal its full conductive potential. Unfortunately, we didn’t have so much time at our disposal during this test session, so we cannot really make any judgment about the efficiency of the MX-1.

The fans used on Freezer coolers are built with Arctic Ceramic bearings, are identical for both cooler models and differ only by the rotation speed and the power connector. The connector on Freezer 7 Pro is four-pin, so that the mainboard could control its rotation speed (PWM).