Thermaltake Frio Overclocking CPU Cooler Review

Frio Test Results

As you probably can surmise, running stock air cooling on the Intel i7-860 just does not seem that bright if you intend to do any heavy lifting with your processor. Even at stock speeds the Intel stock cooling took a beating under load and had temperatures above 99 degrees.

These temperatures were so hot, that I didnt even finish the entire 30-minute Prime95 test. Instead after about 5 minutes I just turned it off. Of course the Thermaltake Frio did quite a bit better than stock even
when using low fan speeds. Under load, we were able to keep the rig
cool at a manageable 55 degrees.

Cutting our temperatures with just a simple CPU cooler upgrade gave us confidence
to really push and overclock the Intel Core i7-860 CPU that we are using on the test system. With the help of the Thermaltake
Frio were able to get our Intel Core i7-860 stable at 4.1 GHz! We were
actually able to push it a bit further at 4.3GHz and with the fans blowing at
maximum speed, but the system couldnt complete a Prime95 run. This was more
than acceptable though for us.

With both fans at maximum, we were able to hold temperatures under 70-degrees. Not too bad! With the fan speed at low on the Thermaltake Frio we were able to still run 4.1GHz, but the temperature was at 89.5C under full load. This is still cooler than the Intel HSF at just 2.8GHz though. By changing over to the Thermaltake Frio we were essentially able to overclock the system by roughly 1300MHz, which is impressive.