Thread: Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro worse than stock cooler!?

G'day guys, this is my first post here so be nice

I am no noob when it comes to hardware and am a regular user of MSFN forums but decided I should sign up for a hardware forum as that is what I am most interested in. I have a slight problem to start out with

A few days ago I bought an Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro to replace the stock cooler on my C2D E7300 2.66Ghz. I removed the cooler and cleaned the CPU off with q-tips and metho then installed the freezer 7 pro (which has MX-2 TIM already applied) and booted up.

The fan is a PWM fan and runs at around 1000-1800RPM most of the time. It seems as quiet at idle and quieter at load than my stock cooler, however when I looked at the temps, my CPU was running slightly hotter! It went from around 33C at idle to about 36C. At load it is about the same but I expected much better performance from a heatsink three times bigger than the stock one!

So I went about trying to make it run cooler so I could overclock it in the near future. I took it back off and cleaned the MX-2 TIM off the CPU and heatsink. I then applied Arctic Silver 5 as I thought this might get the idle temps below 30C. I was wrong. Temps stayed roughly the same. Went up a few degrees at idle and is running at a fan speed of 1500RPM (about twice the speed of the stock cooler at idle...although it is still just as quiet).

So I then went on to lower the voltage on the CPU in a desperate attempt to at least see the temps lower. I lowered the CPU down about 0.15V and the north and south bridge down 0.1V each. Still absolutely no difference. I am now wondering what is left to do? I do not want to lap the heatsink as I do not think that will help (both cores in my CPU run within 1 to 2C of each other). Would going and reapplying the TIM again but in a different way help? (when I put the AS5 on I put a very small ball of it in the middle of the CPU heat spreader) The room temp of my house is not very high (way under 20C, probably around 15C - I live the lowest state of Australia where it does not get very hot and it is winter right now)

Any ideas would be appreciated

Just in case you are wondering, I have a relatively decent case (a foxconn ATX midi tower of some sort) a good rear case fan (120mm coolermaster silent LED running at about 1100RPM), a good power supply (Antec true power 2.0 430W), and only one hard drive plus a Geforce 9600GT. And my motherboard has heatsinks all over the CPU MOSFET area (gigabyte GA-EP45-DS4P). Thanks for any help in advance!

I am using the bios (only for idle temp), gigabyte easy tune 6, real temp 3.00, and core temp to get the same basic readings for both the stock and freezer 7 pro.
It is fairly firm and the TIM really glues it on so it is even hard to take back off! I can however tilt it left to right a little. Maybe changing the direction of the cooler might help? Instead of blowing out the back, do you think blowing up through the power supplies fan might make a difference? Worth a try?
Thanks for your advice so far.