This study evaluates the Antarctic Circumpolar Wave (ACW) as simulated by the SINTEX coupled model. We found evidence that sea-ice treatment plays a crucial role on simulating the ACW. In particular, SST anomalies at interannual time scales describe a propagating ACW-like pattern when a dynamic thermodynamic sea-ice model is coupled with the ocean, but when sea-ice is relaxed to climatology, anomalies occur as zonally symmetric patterns that do not propagate in longitude. Moreover, from the experiment with an active sea-ice component we saw that ACW-like oscillations are strongly modulated by low frequency variability. Our result adds some extra confidence to previous studies based on relatively short series of observed data.