Hardware Bistro

Product: Alpine 11 Pro
Manufacturer: Arctic Cooling
Supplied by: Arctic Cooling
Price: 13.9USD/RM50
Launch Date: May 2009

 

With the new socket release by Intel, Arctic Cooling has responded to it with their new series of CPU cooler in May 2009; Alpine 11. Among these Alpine 11 coolers, we will take a look on Alpine 11 Pro which is the highest end CPU coolers among the rest of the two coolers. Basically Arctic Cooling Alpine 11 Pro is an entry CPU cooler which is targeting entry market with limited budget.

 

Company Profile

ARCTIC COOLING is a privately owned company founded in 2001 with headquarters in Switzerland, offices in Hong Kong and the USA and production facilities in Asia. The ARCTIC COOLING team consists o f international highly educated people with business, technical and communicational skills. The attitude to work is based o n Swiss principles of innovative spirit and high standards of workmanship for which it is recognized internationally. This striving for excellence is integrated in all processes as a matter of course.

ARCTIC COOLING´s core competencies are multifarious including systematic noise reduction, copper and aluminum heatsink development, customization of thermal solutions, as well as designing quiet fans. More recently quiet and cool PC Cases and Power Supplies have been developed.

 

Features

• Ultra quiet 92mm PWM fan with low noise impeller
• Optimized heatsink efficient heat dissipation
• Patented fan holder eliminates the buzzing sounds
• Patented vibration absorption
• Pre-applied MX-2
• Easy installation with push pins

 

Specifications

Package & Contents

 

Arctic Cooling Alpine 11 Pro is packed with a small square cardboard box with white color which is the standard theme for all Arctic Cooling products. Main features, specifications and cooling performance comparison with stock cooler are printed on the packaging itself for reference purpose.

 

Basically Arctic Cooling Alpine 11 Pro doesn't come with much thing except a user's manual, Arctic Cooling logo and four sets of fastener (black) and push pin (white). There isn't any funky accessory for Arctic Cooling Alpine 11 but 6 six years warranty is provided which looks pretty promising.

 

A Closer Look: Arctic Cooling Alpine 11 Pro

Arctic Cooling Alpine 11 series CPU cooler consists of three CPU coolers; Alpine 11 Pro, Alpine 11 GT and Alpine 11 (power, mainstream & entry). All these three Alpine 11 coolers are quite similar in term of design and layout but there are quite different in term of performance as the Alpine 11 GT and Alpine 11 come with smaller heatsink, smaller cooling fan as well as lesser fins. 

Here are the exact specification comparison between all these three Arctic Cooling Alpine 11 coolers. 

 

The overall dimension of Arctic Cooling Alpine 11 Pro is around 105.3 x 113.4 x 85 mm (L x W x H) which is pretty standard dimension for such entry cooler and its weight is just 428 grams. Although Arctic Cooling Alpine 11 series coolers are born for Intel new socket 1156 but they are still compatible with previous famous Intel sockets 775; good news for those are not planning to migrate to new socket soon. 

 

One of the obvious advantages of Arctic Cooling Alpine 11 Pro is the patented fan folder which is shown as above. Such similar new fan holder is widely being used for some of the new coolers to replace the conventional fan. The fan holder together with the fan of Arctic Cooling Alpine 11 Pro can be detached from the whole cooler easily by removing two screws and unlocking it with the aluminum heatsink.

 

Such fan holder is not only able to minimize the buzzing sounds but also vibration noise by applying Arctic Cooling patented vibration absorption. Such simple tool will able to reduce the noise greatly without lowering the fan speed which may impact the cooling performance directly. For Arctic Cooling Alpine 11 Pro, it is using ultra quiet 92mm PWM fan with low noise impeller.

 

Two major bearing types can be found on Arctic Cooling products; ceramic bearing and fluid dynamic bearing. Basically fluid dynamic bearing is equal to hydrostatic bearing which is better than standard ball bearing fan in term of life span, noise as well as vibration. Arctic Cooling Alpine 11 Pro is using a PWM fan hence it comes with 4-pin power connector which is supported by most of the motherboards since pass few years ago.

 

The whole heatsink of Arctic Cooling Alpine 11 Pro is just made by aluminum material which is pretty standard for such entry cooler but the best combination is still aluminum heatsink (best heat dissipation) plus copper base (best heat conduction). The total aluminum fins of Arctic Cooling Alpine 11 Pro is around 30 pieces which has thicker fins at the bottom while thinner fins at the top for allowing the air flow to cool down the fins more efficiency.

 

Here is the retention module of Arctic Cooling Alpine 11 Pro where it needs to be disassembled before it can be mounted on the motherboard. This retention module has four mounting holes and basically each of these holes is having 1½ hole so that it can support both LGA socket 775 and socket 1156; pretty interesting retention module where it can support both sockets with this simply design. Besides that Arctic Cooling Alpine 11 Pro also allows easier maintenance as the whole fan module can be detached off by just unfasten the clips.

 

After remove out the retention module and fan holder, here is the bare heatsink of Arctic Cooling Alpine 11 Pro. Nothing much to talk about its heatsink construction since it is just a bare aluminum heatsink without any heatpipe, copper base, direct touch and so on but this is reasonable for keeping the cost as low as possible. Anyway a thin layer of MX-2 thermal compound is pre-applied on the aluminum base but we still prefer a tube of thermal compound.

 

Installation, Testing & Performance

 

First of all, the retention bracket needs to be installed on the motherboard and motherboard isn't need to be removed out from the system since no back plate is required (Assuming user is upgrading from stock cooler to Arctic Cooling Alpine 11 Pro). After that the white push pin needs to be inserted inside the mounting hole of the motherboard; there are total four push pins.

 

The push pin can be fully inserted by using a flat head screw driver and unfully insert will cause the fastener can't be inserted to lock the bracket completely. For locking the fastener on the mounting bracket, it will take some force to do so and user needs to ensure all the fasteners & push pins are lower than the retention module else the heatsink can't be mounted correctly which cause the processor and cooler are not attached completely.

 

Next will be placing the Arctic Cooling Alpine 11 Pro with the fan holder together on top of the retention module then fasten them together by using two screws. After this step is completed, please do the checking again to ensure the installation is done correctly. The whole installation process should only take around 15 minutes and overall we didn't encounter any deadly issue but we still found that the retention module can only be installed in east-west way but not north-south way for test system as it has compatible issue with the MOSFET of the motherboard. So remember to do some checking before start the installation to avoid any unwanted uninstallation in half way.

 

Test Bed:

Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E8300 @ 2.83GHz
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3 (Gigabyte G31M-ES2L)
Heatsink: Arctic Cooling Alpine 11 Pro
Memory: Kingston HyperX DDR2 8500
Hard Drive: 250GB 7200RPM 8MB Seagate
Graphic Card: Galaxy GeForce GTX260+
Casing: In Win Maelstrom
PSU: In Win Commander 750W
Router: TRENDnet TEW-639GR
Optical Drive: DVD RW
Monitor: Dell 22" Wide Screen LCD
Speaker: Edifier R501
Mouse: SteelSeries Ikari Laser
Mouse Pad: SteelSeries QcK+
HeadSet: SteelSeries 3H
Operating System: Microsoft XP Pro SP2/Vista Home Premium
Ambient Temperature: 27 Degree Celsius

Here are the performance results of Arctic Cooling Alpine 11 Pro and Intel stock cooler. Based on the data that we obtained, obviously it showed that Arctic Cooling Alpine 11 Pro outperforms the Intel stock cooler with 6°C better. This result is awesome for such simple cooler and its noise is still much lower than the stock cooler as well; thanks to the unique patented fan holder, vibration absorption as well as ultra quiet PWM fan from Arctic Cooling. 

 

Verdicts

If you are looking for an entry CPU cooler without spending much on it then Arctic Cooling Alpine 11 Pro is one of the good choices among the rest of the entry CPU coolers. Arctic Cooling Alpine 11 Pro is not only come with decent cooling performance but also lower noise with its unique patented fan holder & vibration absorption which helps to minimize those unwanted noise without impacting the cooling performance. With 14USD, Arctic Cooling Alpine 11 Pro is definitely a super cheap deal you can get in town.

Pros:

+ Super Value
+ Ultra quiet operation
+ PWM fan; auto adjustable fan
+ Patented fan holder & vibration absorption
+ Supports socket 775 & 1156
+ Easy installation; no back plate is required

Cons:

- Only comes with a layer of MX-2
- Non universal mounting bracket

 

Thanks to Arctic Cooling for providing this sample for us to review.

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