Arctic Freezer 61 is a budget-friendly CPU cooler with MX7 thermal paste and a six-year warranty

Arctic has unveiled the Freezer 61 at Computex — a new air CPU cooler starting at around 50 euros ($58). While most of this year's Computex announcements are firmly in the "spend big" camp, Arctic is going the other direction.

The Freezer 61 is a twin heatsink, twin fan setup with six heatpipes running through a copper base plate. The clever bit is that the two fans aren't the same size. The outer fan is an Arctic P12 Pro Reverse, while the fan sitting between the two heatsinks is a smaller P14 Pro Reverse. That size difference is intentional — the smaller fan keeps the cooler from clashing with RAM sticks in your motherboard's DIMM slots, a real-world headache that plagues plenty of large air coolers. Both fans are reverse models for aesthetic reasons. The cooler comes in a plain black non-RGB version and a fully white RGB variant. Every unit ships with Arctic's MX7 thermal paste and a six-year warranty, which is a solid bundle at this price point.

DIMM clearance is a genuine issue with big tower coolers. Arctic's own example: the Thermalright PA120SE forces users to push the front fan upward regardless of which memory sticks are installed, slightly choking airflow through the heatsink. The Freezer 61's mixed fan sizing is designed to sidestep that problem entirely.

Arctic already makes some of the best AIO coolers on the market, so the Freezer 61 has a strong pedigree behind it. Hands-on testing results are still to come.