The current trend in PC cooling is big, silent, and effective cooling for the most part coupled with a lot of heatsinks and a huge fan. High-performance coolers these days are massive towers that usually require special installation and a large fan but with that come amazing overclocks, near ambient temperature levels at times, and all with near silent solutions. Asus is one of the largest and most trusted names in PC hardware and as you probably know have products of almost every kind imaginable. Cooling is somewhat newer to them though and that is what we have to look at today, the Asus Arctic Square CPU cooler.

Rather than a square the Asus Arctic Square is more like a cylinder, round at the top with a great looking metcallic finish and design with the Asus logo proudly displayed on the top. It features a copper base and four copper heatpipes, though they come in a metallic color to match the rest of the aluminum of the numerous fins that makeup the heatsink.

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Weight is a hefty 667 grams and the dimensions of the heatsink are 108x106x135 mm. It is definitely a large and heavy heatsink if not one of the largest we've seen so far. Inside the heatsink rests a 92mm fan which varies it's speed but is rated for 2300rpm.

Inside the box it comes with mounting for both AMD's K8 and AM2 socket as well as Intel's Socket 775, a manual, screws, and the fastening clip. Installing it on an AM2 motherboard wasn't too difficult though far from the easiest heatsink installation we've dealt with. You remove your motherboard's mounting on top and install with their bracket fastening it with four clips and screwing it into place. You must come in at a side angle to place the heatsink on the retention bracket, once this is done you use a universal clip underneath the heatsink which fastens on the inside of the mounting brackets. We think it would be better if as with the Tuniq there was a knob or something else to hold the bracket in place as it can be tricky to work within. Additionally, the manual could be clearer and better diagrams would be appreciated though installation isn't too tough.

And now our test system.

To test the system we used the very hot and power hungry AMD Athlon FX 62 processor with the Nvidia 590 SLI chipset.

We ran Valve's map compilation benchmark which puts both cores of the CPU at a maximum load and stressful conditions. Our idle results were taken five minutes into boot up of Windows XP SP2. Asus' own PC probe was used for the readout. Arctic Silver 5 was the thermal paste used.

As you can see the Arctic Square definitely does a much better job at cooling than the stock AMD cooler and bests Zerotherm's BTF90. That is to be expected though as this is a rather large heatsink and fan combination.

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