Installation:

   Installing the Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro is simply put: Easy. It's just as easy as installing your stock AMD socket 939 cooler most of you received when you bought your retail boxed AMD 939 CPU. And if you bought just about any AMD socket 939 motherboard, you should've gotten the stock cpu heatsink mounting bracket already attached to it. If so, you're good to go so far.

   In my own personal experience, I had to remove the previous aftermarket backplate (Zalman) I had installed in a previous review and re-attach the stock backplate and mounting bracket (luckily I kept it) I received with my ASUS A8N-SLI Premium. Again most of you probably already have this stock bracket attached, if not hopefully you kept it anyway as I did.

   Once I had the stock bracket reinstalled, installing the Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro was a snap. Simply remove the clear plastic cover over the pre-applied thermal compound , position the airflow direction towards the rear of the case (see chart), center the copper base of the Freezer 64 Pro on the CPU, then carefully line up the brackets and rotate levers on each side to tighten. That's it.

   As I was lining up the Freezer 64 Pro on top of my AMD X2 4400+, I noticed the copper base was a good bit smaller than the actual CPU. It concerned me at first, but I let it go figuring Arctic Cooling surely did the research necessary and it should be fine. Temps will tell the tale anyway, so we'll see what happens.

   It was certainly much easier to attach then my previous heatsink, the Zalman V7000B-Cu. Although the Freezer 64 Pro is specific to replacing the stock cooler where as the Zalman was universal and came with a plethora of brackets and required a new backplate.

   Once attached I thought "Wow, that's certainly bigger and beefier than my Zalman" and I went ahead and attached the 3-pin fan wire to the motherboard. Of course at the initial time of installation, I had no other hardware installed on the motherboard ( Ram, Video, etc) so all was well. That was about to take a turn towards "uh oh".