Arctic Freezer 34 Esports Duo Cooler Review: A Twin-Fan Triple Threat

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.

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Specifications

Features

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.