Join for quick access. Enter your email below and we'll send confirmation plus sign you up to our newsletter.
By submitting your information, you confirm you are aged 16 or over,
have read our
Privacy Policy
and agree to the
Terms & Conditions. Geographical rules apply.
The Arctic Freezer 34 Esports Duo not only stands alone as one of the best performing midsized air coolers we have tested in quite some time, it also solidifies itself as one of the best overall due to a very handsome $40 price, making it an impressive bargain.
Reasons to buy
+
Great cooling performance
+
Budget pricing
+
Sophisticated styling
+
Low noise level
Reasons to avoid
-
No aRGB/RGB lighting effects
-
Limited supported Intel and AMD sockets
Why you can trust Tom's Hardware
Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
4/21/2020 Update: When we originally reviewed the Freezew 34 Esports Duo in 2019, it made our list of the best CPU coolers you can buy. While it's no longer on our short list, it's still an excellent mid-sized cooler, though its selling price has ticked up a bit from its $40 MSRP. If you can find this cooler for well below $50, it's a steal for its excellent performance and quiet operation.
Arctic blasts its new Freezer 34 Esports Duo into the heatpipe marketplace with sharp, aggressive styling and a few tricks up its sleeve in the form of disruptive pricing and impressive performance. Shipping standard with dual 120mm Arctic Bionix P120 fans, the Freezer 34 Esports Duo not only comes equipped with clean, bold styling, but enough cooling prowess to best one of our favorite quad-heatpipe coolers.
Arctic ships the Freezer 34 Esports Duo with an expectedly limited set of minimalistic installation hardware supports Intel’s 115x, 2011x and 2066 sockets, and just socket AM4 from AMD. With an active stance on minimizing paper resources, the installation instructions are provided by way of scanning a QR code on the small, included documentation card sticker, or by simply browsing the Arctic.ac website for the Freezer 34 Esports Duo support manuals. For those who might fear the included contents are lacking, don’t fret: Arctic has your CPU covered (literally) by providing a small sleeve of MX-4 thermal compound.
As a midsize quad-heatpipe cooler, the Freezer 34 Esports Duo has a relatively traditional design, while presenting an optimized cooling fin stack with interlocked sides to promote tunneling of air directly through the cooling tower. Heatpipes are evenly offset and collect at the integrated base to allow the Freezer 34 Esports Duo to remain centered above your CPU regardless of cooler orientation.
Dual, 120mm Arctic Bionix fans running fluid dynamic bearings come standard on the Freezer 34 Esports Duo and are rated for speeds from 200 to 2100 RPM. The housing is cast as an integrated, 2-piece mold of rubberized color accents and rigid, matte black casing. The five blades of fury each are managed by 4-pin PWM splitter pigtails.
Aligned and milled flat with the mounting base, the four direct-contact copper heatpipes present a wide contact patch to mate against the CPU’s integrated heat spreader (IHS). Mounting brackets are secured directly to the integrated mounting block using machine screws, while the spring clip mounts swivel to snap and secure over the mounting holes on the pair of 120mm Bionix fans.
From this angle, the sawtooth edges of both the front and rear of the cooling fins is very evident, which are meant to break up the airflow and provide turbulent movement through the cooler itself.
Installation of the Freezer 34 Esorts Duo is relatively straightforward and without difficulty. The cooling tower is installed with fans removed, which makes the addition of the 120mm Bionix spinners incredibly simple with the spring clip mounts. Both fans can be controlled with the same PWM header, as they each have the ability to piggyback into one or the other, greatly simplifying fan RPM management.
Stay On the Cutting Edge: Get the Tom's Hardware Newsletter
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
Garrett Carver is a contributor for Tom’s Hardware, primarily covering thermal compound comparisons and CPU cooling reviews; both air and liquid, including multiple variations of each.
the black and red color scheme should match many mobo designs. looks like a solid budget choice if you have the room in the case. nice looking cooler for $40
and best thing is it lacks 25,000 illumines of rgb. all that rgb makes things look tacky overall and i'm glad they chose to avoid the mistake for those of us who don't want it :)
I have the Arctic 33 eSports Edition (white) and I am Very happy with it.
My 3700x idles at 30-32c and maxes out at 60-62c after hours of gaming.
The Arctic 34 should cool slightly better since it has better fans than mine does.
JrDtGXmView: https://imgur.com/JrDtGXm
Can I ask a noob question. In the first graph what are the CPU PWM lines for? They are blue and green. Is that how much power the CPU is drawing from the motherboard?
Interesting how often a device gets panned because it doesn't have RGB or other power wasting add-ons. As my pappy often said, those are just one more thing to go wrong and ruin the whole kit. Personally, not having these superfluous additions should be a positive.
Can I ask a noob question. In the first graph what are the CPU PWM lines for? They are blue and green. Is that how much power the CPU is drawing from the motherboard?
Temperatures over ambient for the motherboard's power delivery heatsink. I have a thermal probe that sits right in the middle of the cooling fins to measure this since the effectiveness of a CPU cooler also depends on the ability to help maintain airflow over other components in the system, not just keeping the CPU cool.
Have an Arctic Freezer A32 for AM3+ with a push-pull configuration and it is without a doubt the best budget cooler I've ever used, temps barely get in the 40 C gaming; the main thing was the air flow can be directed out the back, whereas a lot of these things has you going north or south with the air flow.
When I move to AM4 you can bet your bottom dollar one of these jewels will be on it.
