4GHz






The Frio is made for overclocking and this is where its true colours really shine. At the lowest fan speed, the Frio does a commendable job with a delta temperature of just 58C, making it better than the likes of the Prolimatech Megahalem, Coolink Corator DS and Thermolab Baram. It's impressive to see it breaking the 60C barrier which had only been achieved by the Thermalright, Coolink and Noctua heatsinks previously, air cooling wise. At the higher fan speeds, the Frio manages to outperform the Thermalright Ultra Extreme with two Noctua NF-P12s, and the Corsair H50 with two Coolink SwiF2-120Ps. Interestingly, having the fan at the maximum recorded speed of 2550 RPM proved to be of no benefit over 1885 RPM, suggesting that the heatsink design is limiting the fans' cooling potential. Another observation is that the Frio performs better with its own fan at 1290 RPM than with the NF-P12s at 1400 RPM showing that the former has better static pressure than the already impressive Noctua fans.

Noise

One of the advantages of the Frio is the possibility to manually control the speed of the fans. The result is that users can balance noise and performance to meet their needs. At the lowest speed setting, the fans rotate at 1290 RPM, operating quietly but sacrificing on cooling performance. Increasing the speed to 1885 RPM, the fans become audible but not intrusively so. They were generally quieter than the CoolIT ECO fans and the Coolink SwiF2-120P which also work at similar speeds on maximum. At 2550 RPM, the VR fans are far too loud for general usage and even going outside of the room with the door shut behind me, they were still audible! Since the fans yielded the same performance at 1885 RPM, I wouldn't recommend going any higher.