Arctic GmbH

Last updated

Arctic GmbH
Company type Private, GmbH
Industry
Founded2001;23 years ago (2001)
HeadquartersBevenroder Straße 149, Braunschweig, Germany
Area served
Worldwide
Key people
Magnus Huber
(Managing director)
Products
Website arctic.de

Arctic GmbH, formerly known as Arctic Cooling, [1] is a German, Swiss-founded manufacturer of computer cooling components, mainly CPU and graphics card coolers, [2] case fans and thermal compound. Since 2010, Arctic expanded its business by starting a range of products to cater other consumer demands beyond that of computer cooling hardware. Nowadays, Arctic also offers various consumer products [3] —spanning audio, [4] home entertainment [5] and computer peripherals. [6] In 2012, Arctic was nominated as one of the finalists in the annual PCR Awards. [7]

Contents

Founded in 2001, Arctic has offices in Germany, Hong Kong and the United States and cooperates with different production facilities in China. Arctic products are distributed worldwide through distributors, [8] dealers and retailers. The United States, United Kingdom and Germany are Arctic's major markets. The company has also collaborated with leading graphics card brands such as HIS, [9] Inno3D, [10] PowerColor, [11] VTX3D, [12] and Sapphire [13] in the development of OEM cooling equipment.

History

In 2001, Arctic Cooling was founded in Switzerland by Magnus Huber. [14] As the company name suggested, in the past, the business focused entirely on computer cooling solutions. Today, in order to expand the business into other areas especially in consumer electronics, by 2010, it began to develop a diverse range of products that spans beyond cooling into computer peripherals, audio products and home entertainment PCs. For this reason, Arctic Cooling was changed to Arctic in 2010. [15] Since 17.11.2015 Arctic Switzerland AG is in liquidation. [16]

Products

Computer cooling

A model of Arctic Cooling 80mm computer fan Arctic cooling fan Pro TC 20060621.jpg
A model of Arctic Cooling 80mm computer fan

Being the company's original focus, Arctic primarily designs and manufactures cooling products for computer hardware, with broad compatibility. [17] The company owned a number of patents for its fan and cooler designs [18] as well as for special technologies used in the air coolers including PWM sharing, [19] low noise impeller, [20] cross blow and anti-vibration technologies. [20]

Freezer

Freezer is a trademark of Arctic for its line of CPU coolers. It includes both the air cooler based on a heatpipe architecture as well as the water cooling solutions.

Alpine

Alpine is a trademark of Arctic for its line of CPU coolers based on Aluminum extrusion heatsink. It includes both active and passive coolers.

Accelero

Accelero is a trademark [21] of Arctic (formerly Arctic Cooling) for its line of graphics card coolers. [22] The Accelero line of coolers are targeted to high-end graphics cards based on GPUs from Nvidia and AMD. [23] The Accelero series utilizes different types of cooling technologies namely air cooling, passive cooling as well as [24] to offer different options for different customers. In 2006, Accelero X1 and Accelero X2 are the first VGA coolers introduced in the series by the manufacturer. [25] [26] The Accelero series has collaborated in a number of OEM projects with motherboard and video card manufacturers to develop customized graphics card cooling solutions. [27] [28] [29] [30] Arctic is the first video card cooler manufacturer to use a copper base for their heatsinks. [31]
In May 2012, ARCTIC released the Accelero Hybrid, which is claimed to be the world's first graphics card cooler with integrated air and liquid solution in the market. [32]

Features

Graphics card coolers are generally served as an upgrade or replacement for the stock cooler in order to reduce noise, temperature and enhance the overclocking capability of the GPU. [33] Arctic's heatsinks are claimed to provide quiet, high performance cooling, [34] which also makes the Accelero series one of the most popular graphics card coolers in the market. [35]

Thermal compound

Among the company's array of thermal compound, the MX-4 received the Top Product Award from the German magazine PC Games Hardware. [36] [37]

Arctic MX-2 thermal compound Arctic - thermal compound (valo139).jpg
Arctic MX-2 thermal compound

PC case

  • Silentium T11 [39]
  • Silentium T Eco 80 [40]

Fusion Power Supplies and Storage Devices

Fusion is Arctic's brand name for various cooling and data storage products, including the Fusion 550- EU, Fusion 550RF, Fusion 550R, Fusion 550F and Fusion 1TB (external hard drive), [41] and the Fusion 1TB data storage device.

Audio series

Arctic started to develop its audio products such as speakers, headphones and headsets since 2010 and it has expanded to wireless audio system near the end of 2011. [42]

Living series

In June 2011, Arctic entered the HTPC market with its first mini HTPC, MC001 Entertainment Center Series, which was first introduced in Computex 2011. [43] In 2012, Arctic introduced more advanced models with MC101 Series, AMD Trinity-powered HTPCs which are aimed for multimedia users. The MC101 Series features AMD Trinity A8/A10 APU, AMD Radeon HD 3D graphics, up to 1TB hard disk storage, SSD, up to 8GB DDR3 memory and built-in TV tuner. [44]

On top of the entertainment centers, Arctic offers as well an audio gateway that works as a Windows Media Center Extender  : Audio Relay. [45] It is not DLNA certified but is compatible with the protocol.

Due to limited commercial success, this product line has been discontinued.

Computer peripherals

Arctic offers a selection of computer peripherals including keyboards, mice, USB fans, etc. In the end of 2011, the brand started to offer Apple accessories.

Power series

The Power series offers various USB travel adapters, car chargers and batteries. [46]

Patents and trademarks

The company has claimed several trademarks and patents for the name and technology applied to their products. Some of the air coolers and case fans produced by the company feature a patent design of the fan holder to achieve vibration absorption and elimination of the buzzing sound when the fan is running. The Freezer 7 Pro features 4 rubber connectors which serve as a vibration damper to absorb the vibration of the running fan and prevent the vibration from transferring to the heatsink and the case. [47] The Arctic F Pro PWM employs the same technology to absorb vibration and prevent it from transmitting across other components within the case. [48]

Arctic claims to be the patent holder of the PWM Sharing Technology, namely PST, which shares a single PWM signal with all the other PWM controlled devices connected to the motherboard to control all fan speeds and enhance the noise level according to the load. [49]

The Freezer 13 PRO CO employs the patented Cross-Blow technology by the use of an extra fan installed at the bottom of the heatsink to give a boost of cooling performance to the surrounding components, including Northbridge and voltage regulators. [50]

The company utilizes its patented passive cooling technology (DE 20200600) in the Accelero S1 PLUS to enhance the level of natural convection from the GPU by letting more air to pass through the aluminum fins so that heat will be dissipated more efficiently. [51]

Some of the key products including Freezer, Accelero, Alpine, Fusion and Silentium series are registered trademarks in the EU and the US. [52]

Branding

Arctic's booth in computex, Taiwan, 2008 Arctic Cooling booth, Computex Taipei 20080604.jpg
Arctic's booth in computex, Taiwan, 2008

In 2011, Arctic has started to engage its end consumers through the means of social media (e.g. Facebook [53] ) to reinforce the brand's awareness. The company was also a platinum partner with PCR Retail Boot Camp [54] – a new conference and expo for the UK PC and IT channel.

Collaborations

Arctic also produces cooling solutions for several graphic card manufactures; in most cases improving cooling beyond the OEM cooler. These include but are not limited to:

Partnership with OpenELEC

Due to the strategic mistake of bundling the MC001 with Microsoft Windows 7 and the high price the MC001 was very badly sold. To increase sales, on 5 February 2013, Arctic announced their new partnership with OpenELEC. Arctic worked with OpenELEC together and combined a fully passive cooled entertainment system - the MC001 media centre (US and EU version) equipped with the latest XBMC 12 (OpenELEC 3.0) platform. Arctic and OpenELEC were planning on their next release, aimed to provide a more dedicated builds for the Arctic MC001 systems. [55] [56] [57] [58] [59] [60] [61] Shortly after partnershipping with OpenELEC, the development of passively cooled media centers was abandoned.

Dispute

Arctic was reportedly planning to file a lawsuit against AMD for the infringement of its trademark "Fusion", the name that AMD used to describe its series of APUs which integrate x86 processing cores with Radeon stream processors on the same piece of silicon. [62] In light of the lawsuit, AMD has announced earlier in 2012 its plans to drop its Fusion branding in favor of the Heterogeneous Systems Architecture (HSA). [63] On 23 January 2013, Arctic announced that the company and AMD arrived at a mutual agreement in settling the "Fusion" trademark dispute without any disclosure of the terms. [64]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Graphics card</span> Expansion card which generates a feed of output images to a display device

A graphics card is a computer expansion card that generates a feed of graphics output to a display device such as a monitor. Graphics cards are sometimes called discrete or dedicated graphics cards to emphasize their distinction to an integrated graphics processor on the motherboard or the central processing unit (CPU). A graphics processing unit (GPU) that performs the necessary computations is the main component in a graphics card, but the acronym "GPU" is sometimes also used to erroneously refer to the graphics card as a whole.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Quiet PC</span> Type of personal computer

A quiet, silent or fanless PC is a personal computer that makes very little or no noise. Common uses for quiet PCs include video editing, sound mixing and home theater PCs, but noise reduction techniques can also be used to greatly reduce the noise from servers. There is currently no standard definition for a "quiet PC", and the term is generally not used in a business context, but by individuals and the businesses catering to them.

Zalman Tech Co. is a South Korean software engineering company manufacturing aftermarket desktop computer products focusing on cooling enhancement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kodi (software)</span> Free software media player

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">AMD APU</span> Series of microprocessors by AMD

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Unified Video Decoder is the name given to AMD's dedicated video decoding ASIC. There are multiple versions implementing a multitude of video codecs, such as H.264 and VC-1.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Radeon HD 5000 series</span> Series of video cards

The Evergreen series is a family of GPUs developed by Advanced Micro Devices for its Radeon line under the ATI brand name. It was employed in Radeon HD 5000 graphics card series and competed directly with Nvidia's GeForce 400 series.

X-Video Bitstream Acceleration (XvBA), designed by AMD Graphics for its Radeon GPU and APU, is an arbitrary extension of the X video extension (Xv) for the X Window System on Linux operating-systems. XvBA API allows video programs to offload portions of the video decoding process to the GPU video-hardware. Currently, the portions designed to be offloaded by XvBA onto the GPU are currently motion compensation (MC) and inverse discrete cosine transform (IDCT), and variable-length decoding (VLD) for MPEG-2, MPEG-4 ASP, MPEG-4 AVC (H.264), WMV3, and VC-1 encoded video.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Radeon HD 7000 series</span> Series of video cards

The Radeon HD 7000 series, codenamed "Southern Islands", is a family of GPUs developed by AMD, and manufactured on TSMC's 28 nm process.

Noctua is an Austrian computer hardware manufacturer of CPU coolers and computer fans with a primary focus on the enthusiast market. The company's inception occurred in 2005 through a joint venture partnership between the Austrian company Rascom Computer distribution Ges.m.b.H., established in August 2000, and the Taiwanese cooling specialist Kolink International Corporation.

Xtreamer was a brand of home digital media player and HTPC products. The product line's goal is to replace traditional video players in homes with more versatile, but still affordable, players. These players are capable of playing large collections of digital media - movies, music, and photos. The digital files can be streamed to the player from the local network, hence the name of the brand. The company has since shut down.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Socket FM2</span> CPU socket for AMD CPUs

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EVGA Corporation is an American computer hardware company that produces motherboards, gaming laptops, power supplies, all-in-one liquid coolers, computer cases, and gaming mice. Founded on April 13, 1999, its headquarters are in Brea, California. EVGA also produced Nvidia GPU-based video cards until 2022.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">CuBox</span> Nettop computer

CuBox and CuBox-i are series of small and fanless nettop-class computers manufactured by the Israeli company SolidRun Ltd. They are all cube-shaped and sized at approximately 2 × 2 × 2 inches and weigh 91 grams. CuBox was first announced in December 2011 and began shipping in January 2012, initially being marketed as a cheap open-source developer platform for embedded systems.

OpenELEC is a discontinued Linux distribution designed for home theater PCs and based on the Kodi media player.

The Freezer is the name of the CPU coolers from Arctic GmbH, which has been the company's staple product for many years. To most enthusiasts, Arctic is best known for their Freezer line of CPU coolers as well as their thermal compound called MX-2 and MX-4. The Freezer line of coolers is available in different fan speed, cooling capacity and motherboard compatibility to cater the needs of different type of users from HTPC users to enthusiasts and overclockers. The Freezer series CPU coolers are designed to lower the temperature inside your computer to enhance the stability and lifespan of the processor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Radeon 200 series</span> Series of video cards

The Radeon 200 series is a series of graphics processors developed by AMD. These GPUs are manufactured on a 28 nm Gate-Last process through TSMC or Common Platform Alliance.

The graphics processing unit (GPU) codenamed Radeon R600 is the foundation of the Radeon HD 2000 series and the FireGL 2007 series video cards developed by ATI Technologies. The HD 2000 cards competed with nVidia's GeForce 8 series.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Socket FM2+</span> CPU socket for laptop AMD CPUs

Socket FM2+ is a zero insertion force CPU socket designed by AMD for their desktop "Kaveri" APUs (Steamroller-based) and Godavari APUs (Steamroller-based) to connect to the motherboard. The FM2+ has a slightly different pin configuration to Socket FM2 with two additional pin sockets. Socket FM2+ APUs are not compatible with Socket FM2 motherboards due to the aforementioned additional pins. However, socket FM2 APUs such as "Richland" and "Trinity" are compatible with the FM2+ socket.

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