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Artic Cooling's Freezer Pro 7 is a heavy duty, but highly affordable, processor cooling solution.

Key components for the project (clockwise from left) were Maxtor hard drive, Asus motherboard, generic power supply, cooling fan, GeForce 5200 graphics cards, QX6850 processor, and DDR2 memory.  Intel's QX6850 processor has four cores running at 3.0-GHz each.  Most noticeable on the Asus PK5 Premium motherboard are the copper heat pipes which help keep the core-logic chips cool.  This empty case has ample room for our motherboard and extra-large fan-and-heatsink combo.  A generic power supply was probably not the best choice for this high-end quad-core project.  A 24-to-20-pin adaptor for the power supply's 12-V connection is a necessary accessory when working with leading-edge motherboards.  There are better options to cool your processor than Intel's stock Socket 775 fan.  StarTech.com's Socket 775 aftermarket processor fan has a well-designed, screw-based mounting system.  Artic Cooling's Freezer Pro 7 is a heavy duty, but highly affordable, processor cooling solution.  The Freezer Pro's huge cooling fins take up a lot of space inside the PC case, but do their job well.  Before installing the Asus motherboard inside the case, it's fitted with the Freezer Pro processor cooling unit.  The Asus motherboard is lowered into the case to test the fit, before the Freezer Pro cooling unit is attached and the board is screwed into place.  Final installation showing the board, Freezer Pro, graphics card, hard drive, and all the power connectors attached.  Asus provides a CD with utilities to install all the necessary drivers.  The quad-core system was benchmarked using the popular PCMark05 test suite from Futuremark.  PCMark05 gets ready to lock and load for its second round of CPU benchmarks.  Graphics comprise the most stringent portion of PCMark and its companion 3DMark graphics benchmark suite.  This 3DMark test screen stresses the ability of the system to rapidly create a series of high-res images.  Futuremark offers a neat connection to their Web site, where you can view detailed results for your PC and compare them to similar systems.  The QX6850 did well on the CPU Test Suite portion of the PCMark 05 test.  CPU-Z is a freeware utility you can use to make sure your system is running the way you intended.  Everest Ultimate edition is a useful program for monitoring the temperature of multicore processors. 

Artic Cooling's Freezer Pro 7 is a heavy duty, but highly affordable, processor cooling solution.