Glacialtech Alaska CPU Cooler Review

Final Thoughts and Conclusion

GlacialTech has a solid middle of the road cooler with the Alaska performance-wise. The Alaska is also built very well. The fin arrangement for the Alaska is definitely on the different side. I have seen honeycomb style coolers before, but none with fin spacing as tight as the Alaska has. The Alaska is also surprisingly light, coming in at 740g it is a full 200g lighter than the Super Mega.

I only really have two complaints about the Alaska, one minor, the other not so much. The first is the instructions; the Intel crowd is fine because the parts used and images in the documentation match. AMD, not so lucky; the images and parts dont match. Someone with a build or two under their belt should get by without issue. Those who are building their first rig may have some head scratching to figure out how to match up the parts in their hand to those in the instructions.

The big issue, and the annoying one, is the mounting system. Mainly the problem is the location of the mounting bolts in relation to the cooler. The Alaska is wide enough that putting the cooler on a smaller socket like the 1156 or 775 sockets could be a royal pain. The mounting screws go in from the top and the 775 and 1156 sockets will be pretty well covered by the cooling fins. This leaves the small wrench to tighten the mounting screws. Depending on the board and what is around the socket that could take a while at 1/8-1/2 turn at a time. With a cooler this wide I would have like to have seen the screws come from the other side.

I tried to locate the Alaska online to buy and I had no luck in doing so. I also could not find a price so we asked GlacialTech where we could get one and what the cost was. They told us that the Alaska carries a MSRP of $49.99 and has a one year warranty. Nothing was mentioned as to where to someone could get one.

With the MSRP of $49.99 the GlacialTech Alaska is in the upper midrange cooling price point. It is also performing in that range as well. Even though the Alaska works, it is a pain to install and is almost like looking for Bigfoot when trying to purchase. At the same price point, a whole lot easier to find and a solid performer would be the Zalman CPNS10X Performa.

Legit Bottom Line: GlacialTechs Alaska cooler is a nice performing cooler that is easy on the wallet, but is hard to install and even harder to find.