With the advent of Alder Lake CPUs, the socket is changing and LGA 1700 this time changes the situation in terms of mounting. Arctic is currently responding to this with an announcement for current and future owners of coolers from this company. There are two pieces of good news. The first is that you can also install older Arctic coolers on new Intel processors, and the second message refers to an upcoming cooler that will have native support.
We have already written about the change in physical dimensions of both Alder Lake processors and the socket (Intel LGA 1700) designed for them. Everything has gotten a bit bigger, and with that comes wider mounting hole spacing, but it’s still square-shaped. So hopefully the advantage over AMD AM4 in two-way installation options for the vast majority of coolers will still remain. More important than that though is this migration of Arctic to the new platform. The company has an up-to-date statement on this issue and it is quite pro-customer.
Arctic will have a mounting kit for the LGA 1700 socket that will be available to buy separately or you can claim it for free. This will of course be possible only after you prove ownership of the cooler and CPU or motherboard. Arctic will thus introduce a system similar to what Noctua has been running for years. The difference being that Arctic’s coolers are often significantly cheaper than Noctua’s coolers. In fact, you also get the new mounting system for free with the inexpensive Freezer 34 cooler.
Though, unlike Noctua, not all coolers will get Intel LGA 1700 support. Apparently, it will not be possible to attach the new fasteners to the bases of some coolers. Arctic hasn’t yet indicated whether there will be one kit or more, like Noctua has. However, it is already known which cooler models will be compatible. Apart from the aforementioned Freezer 34, LGA 1700 support also pertains to the Freezer i13 X (CO), Freezer 50 and a whole assortment of Liquid Freezer II liquid coolers. This is actually most of the more powerful coolers Arctic has in their current offer (again, there aren’t that many of them…). So the Freezer 7 X will not be supported at least initially, nor will the older Freezer Xtreme.
Mounting kits for the above mentioned coolers should be available from mid-October. This is also true for separate sales, in the Arctic e-shop for a final price of 5,99 euros (+ shipping costs). But we hope that most of you will be able to claim free delivery.
At the same time, Arctic says that a new Freezer i35 A-RGB will be announced in late October, which will naturally count with the LGA 1700 from its release. This will possibly also mean formatting the base to accommodate the first processors (Alder Lake) for this platform. Arctic is scant on details though, and the only thing it reveals is that the cooler will support addressable/digital RGB LED lighting, which is evident from its name.
English translation and edit by Jozef Dudáš
