Thermaltake Frio Instalation - Temps & Review

For the past year I have been running the stock AMD Phenom x6 cooler and that thing was horrible. It was load under load and wouldn't do a great job keeping my rig cool. I would peak around 50C under full load with that old thing. Recently one of my friends went water cooled and he sold me his frio. Now that I have it installed I was able to overclock and still achieve lower temps on full load than I did with the stock cooler.

Installation
Installing this thing was easy! This was my first time having to follow all of the steps suck as the back plate and thermal paste when installing a new heat sync. The original one had pre-applied thermal paste and all I had to do was snap it into place. With the new frio I had to install the back plate as well as apply new thermal paste.

For starters, never pull your old heat sync straight up... I did that and ended up puling out my CPU along with it. Luckily nothing was damaged. I even ran the computer for an hour before fulling off the old cooler so the thermal paste could loosen. I just gently pulled and next thing you know the processor is on the bottom of the old cooler. I just pried it off and re-inserted it and there were no problems. For future reference I will gently turn it left and right to loosen the seal before I go pulling straight up.

Next I had to apply the new thermal paste to the core. Now this is something that I have NEVER done so I was a little hesitant to do it. I looked online and there were so many different ideas of how to apply the stuff. I ended up just putting down about a pea and a half and spreading it out into a very thin even layer on the processor. This appears to work well.

Getting the back plate in place was fun, the top two screw were just a little too high. (My Antec case has a hole in the back to allow access to the back place without having to remove the motherboard.) What I did was slightly unscrew the motherboard and that gave me enough give to get the old screws out and install the news ones to support the back place and the new cooler.

After all of this, I plugged in the two fans for the cooler, yes it has two fans, and then I noticed, only one would fit. My RAM wouldn't allow the first fan to go on. I tried moving the RAM to the outer slots but my BIOS didn't like that and would refuse to let my computer boot. I ended up leaving one fan on. Everything still worked fine with one fan once under load but I was determined that it could be better with the use of the two fans. I talked with my friend and he recommended that I update the BIOS. Turns out that the update allowed me to move the modules over to the outer slots and install both fans! So now I was getting the temps I wanted!

Temps
This thing is amazing! When I first boot my computer it was able to keep the stock cpu running at around 13C idle - I couldn't believe it! Even on full load I couldn't get the thing to go beyond 25C. Remember that with the old stock cooler it would go all the way to around 50C. I cut my temps in half with this thing!

So I saw the great temps and decided it would be more then safe to overclock my processor. I was able to bring the 2.8 up to a 3.5GHz processor and my temps barely suffered. I now idle at 20C and peak no higher then 30C with my overclock!

Review / Conclusion
Overall this thing is great! I was so happy to finally get rid of that stock cooler and use something more efficient. I was also so happy to finally be able to overclock my processor with out having to worry about the thing over heating.

In conclusion, if you need a new cooler and don't want to go water cooled just yet, the Thermaltake Frio is the cooler for you. It keeps your processor cool, even below room temperature and allows you to overclock your mind out!

If you have some questions about the cooler, let me know in the comments and I would be happy to talk to you even more about it!