Gelid Solutions Antarctica CPU Cooler Review

Below you can see the thin and tall profile. It is well balanced and doesn’t fall over, and is symmetrical, so you can place the fan on either face of the heatsink.

The Antarctica has a second heatsink, which is one of the better attempts we have seen. It’s solid and will aid some heat dissipation. It is also part of the base plate assembly which holds the five heat pipes.

The base is polished, and the slight discolouration is residue from plastic film that protects the surface during transit. We thought we had removed it all but under studio lighting, it shows up. The copper is flat also, but it can always be taken further if required. If you rub thermal paste into the base plate before mounting, this will fill a good number of scratches or imperfections that may cause performance issues

Test Set Up

• Processor: Intel i7-6700K
• Motherboard: ASRock Z170 Extreme4
• Graphics: MSI GTX 970 GAMING Twin Frozr V
• Memory: 16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 2666Mhz
• Drives: Samsung SM951 512GB M.2
• 2x Crucial MX200 500Gb SSD
• PSU: EVGA 850W SuperNOVA G2
• Chassis: MicroCool Banchetto 101 Chassis

Software used for load tests and temperature capture;

• HWiNFO64
• AIDA64 Engineer

We ran the AIDA64 Extreme stability test in 30 minute batches and recorded the results. We used the Core Max result as there was typically a variance across the cores of a couple of degrees. We only selected the cache, FPU and CPU tests, so no other component would generate impacting heat during the tests.

We always “run in” our CPU cooler installations, essential to maximizing the performance of the cooler before testing begins.