ID-Cooling Frozn A620 Pro SE Review: A new level of value

The market for CPU coolers has become more competitive than ever, especially over the past year. Companies like Thermalright in particular have pushed the bar for value and performance with air coolers like the Phantom Spirit 120 EVO in the $40 price range.

But ID-Cooling has recently begun to challenge Thermalright’s claim to the throne for the best value cooling products. Most recently, the company released the FX 360 Pro, a 360mm AIO liquid cooler with performance comparable to coolers that are twice as expensive. Today, we’re looking at the company’s newest challenger, the A620 Pro SE air cooler. This cooler is a revision of the previously released A620, with ID-Cooling promising comparable performance to the original model for only $30, while also running quieter. That certainly sounds good.

Does the A620 Pro SE live up to these lofty promises? Does it have what it takes to earn a spot on our best air coolers list? We’ll have to put it through testing to find out. But first, here are the specifications from ID-Cooling.

Cooler specifications

Packing and included contents

The inner contents are protected by cardboard and plastic coverings to protect the heatsink, fans, and accessories during shipping.

Included with the cooler are the following:

• Dual tower heatsink
• Two 120mm fans
• Mounting for modern AMD and Intel Platforms
• Frost X25 Thermal Paste
• PWM splitter cable

LGA 1700 Installation

The install process for ID-Cooling’s Frozn A620 Pro SE is a simple one. 

1. To start, you’ll press the cooler’s backplate against the rear of your motherboard and secure it with the included mounting studs.

2. The second step is to place the mounting bars on top of the studs, and secure them with the included thumb screws.

3. Place the heatsink on top of the mounting bars and secure it with a screwdriver.

4. Attach the fans using the included fan clips, and then connect the PWM splitter to your motherboard to complete the install process.

Features of ID-Cooling’s FX 360 Pro

● Budget $30 USD MSRP

The most impressive feature of this cooler is the price – at only $30 USD, it’s cheaper than most coolers on the market – including those from Thermalright, known for its budget options.

● Support for a third fan

ID-Cooling includes an extra pair of fan clips, should you wish to supplement this cooler’s performance with a third fan.

● Limited RAM compatibility

If you’re using taller DIMMs like the G-Skill Trident Z DDR4 I’m using, you’ll have to raise the front fan to avoid interfering with your computer’s RAM slots. This won’t cause significant performance loss. Our benchmarks show it performs well.

● Six Copper Heatpipes

The CPU plate connects to six copper heatpipes to transfer heat to its twin heatsink towers.

● Frost X25 Thermal Paste

The AIO comes with a tube of ID-Cooling’s Frost X25 thermal paste. This is the company’s entry level paste, with thermal conductivity advertised at 10.5/M-K. We’ll be taking a look at this paste in more detail in our upcoming refreshed thermal paste tests.

● Two 120mm fans

As I say in nearly every cooler review, there’s more to a cooler than just the heatsink or radiator. The bundled fans significantly impact cooling and noise levels, as well as how the cooler looks in your case.

LGA1700 Socket Bending

There are also many factors other than the CPU cooler that can influence your cooling performance, including the case you use and the fans installed in it. A system's motherboard can also influence this, especially if it suffers from bending, which results in poor cooler contact with the CPU. 

In order to prevent bending from impacting our cooling results, we’ve installed Thermalright’s LGA 1700 contact frame into our testing rig. If your motherboard is affected by bending, your thermal results will be worse than those shown below. Not all motherboards are affected equally by this issue. I tested Raptor Lake CPUs in two motherboards. And while one of them showed significant thermal improvements after installing Thermalright’s LGA1700 contact frame, the other motherboard showed no difference in temperatures whatsoever! Check out our review of the contact frame for more information.

Testing Methodology, and how my testing differs vs the competition

My cooler testing is specifically designed to emulate the conditions a user would actually experience when using a computer. Some reviewers test coolers using an open bench. I do not like this method, it reduces cooling difficulty. When you use a case, the internal temperature of that case will become higher than that of the room’s ambient temperature, increasing the saturation of the cooler and overall cooling difficulty. Testing outside of a case will give an advantage to weaker coolers, especially those with fans that aren’t very strong. 

Others test using a thermal heatplate. This method suffers from all the drawbacks of an open bench, but also doesn’t accurately represent cooling a CPU. A thermal plate evenly distributes a thermal load across the copper heat conduction square. The problem with this type of testing is that modern AMD Ryzen and Intel Core CPUs have most of their heat concentrated in a few hotspots – and cooling a concentrated source of heat is more difficult than cooling a source that’s spread evenly.

The last thing I do differently than some cooler testers is that I insist on using relatively new CPUs for cooler testing because people building new PCs should be using recent CPUs. Also, thermal density is just different with newer CPUs. Products like Ryzen 3000 “Zen 2” and older 14nm Intel CPUs have lower heat density compared to modern counterparts, due to a combination of using older manufacturing processes and running at lower clock speeds. Using a weaker cooler with an older CPU can make the cooler look better performing than it actually is with current-gen silicon. 

Today's highest-end CPUs, whether Intel or AMD, are difficult to cool in intensive workloads. In the past. reaching 95 degrees Celsius or more on a desktop CPU might have been a cause for concern. But with today’s top-end CPUs, this is considered normal operation. Similar behavior has been present in laptops for years due to cooling limitations in tight spaces.

All testing is performed with a 23 degrees C ambient room temperature. Multiple thermal tests are run on each CPU to test the cooler in a variety of conditions, and acoustic measurements are taken with each result. These tests include:

1. Noise-normalized testing at low noise levels

2. Out-of-the-box / Default configuration thermal and acoustic testing

     a. No power limits enforced

     b. Because CPUs hit TJ Max in this scenario, the best way to compare cooling strength is by recording the total CPU package power consumption.

3. Thermal and acoustic testing in power-limited scenarios

     a. Power limited to 175W to emulate a medium-intensity workload

     b. Power limited to 125W to emulate a low-intensity workload

The thermal results included are for 10-minute testing runs. To be sure that was sufficiently long to tax the cooler, we tested both Thermalright’s Assassin X 120 R SE and DeepCool’s LT720 with a 30-minute Cinebench test with Intel’s i9-13900K for both 10 minutes and 30 minutes. The results didn’t change much at all with the longer test: The average clock speeds maintained dropped by 29 MHz on DeepCool’s LT720 and 31 MHz on Thermalright’s Assassin X 120 R SE. That’s an incredibly small 0.6% difference in clock speeds maintained, a margin of error difference that tells us that the 10-minute tests are indeed long enough to properly test the coolers.

Testing configuration – Intel LGA1700 platform