ARCTIC Liquid Freezer II 240 Review – The best AIO (almost)
This is the ARCTIC Liquid Freezer II 240, and it is ALMOST the perfect AIO cooler. Its performance is incredible and they really thought of pretty much everything. The only downside is the mounting method – it’s not the worst I’ve seen, but it could definitely be improved. Either way, it’s a beast and well worth checking out which is what this video is all about. But first, if you haven’t already, consider subscribing for more videos like this one every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
ARCTIC make some great air coolers, namely the Freezer 34 eSports DUO which is still one of my most recommended coolers out there, so when I heard the buzz about their liquid coolers I was excited to check this out. This is a beast of a radiator. It’s 38mm thick without the fans, where a normal rad is more like 30mm, has relatively small end tanks, and central mounted tubing. It’s reasonably dense, and comes with two ARCTIC P12 fans preinstalled out the box – love to see that.
The tubing is sleeved throughout the whole run, and actually hides the fan cables inside it too, so you only need to plug in the single 4 pin PWM header to make this entire thing run, another thing that I absolutely love to see. The block is a bit of a weird shape, partially thanks to it’s VRM fan. One of the drawbacks of using an AIO cooler is normally a lack of airflow in and around your motherboard VRMs, the things that deliver power to your CPU, and especially for the newer Intel chips that can draw 2-300W through them, it’s a good idea to keep all that cool. So, ARCTIC put a little fan to keep the air moving. Remarkably, the tiny little fan is rather quiet and offers a reasonable amount of air too. In fact, the whole thing is quiet. Even when testing with a 9900K which was drawing 160W of package power, it was still whisper quiet, certainly quieter than my usual Fractal Design S24.
For me, the main let down of the Freezer II is it’s mounting methods, especially on AMD CPUs. With a normal ASETEK design, you screw standoffs into the existing motherboard backplate, then drop the block down and use pretty large thumbscrews to hold it in place. Nice and simple. On this though, you have to put two plastic spacers down, then a bracket on top, then use tiny screwdriver only screws to hold it down, repeat that on the other side for a total of 4 white plastic rings, then screw the universal bracket arms to the pump, then place it down, then use 4 tiny thumbscrews to hold that down. It’s a lot more finicky and complicated. For the average person who installs their cooler once, this isn’t a big deal. You can screw the brackets in with the motherboard out the case and it’s fine. But from a reviewer perspective, I can’t see myself using this to test in the future explicitly because of this mounting method.
It’s actually much better on Intel boards – there they provide a backplate that you screw standoffs into, then drop the cooler down and use the thumbscrews. Sadly, because of the “one size fits all” arms that go on the block, it came dangerously close to shorting the VRM and blocking the top M.2 slot on the Z390 board I was using to test with. It worked fine, but it was very tight.
But, if you can get over the mounting methods, man is it a good cooler. Take a look at the Blender BMW run with a Ryzen 5900X, the CPU is drawing 142W here, and the cooler isn’t even breaking a sweat. It’s remarkably quiet, and even with sustained runs it didn’t peak above 80°c, which for comparison my usual Fractal S24 reaches 83°c with the same test. Even with the hotter 9900K that peaked at 88°c where usually I’d expect to see the low 90°c range. It’s not worlds better, but it’s a marked improvement.
And again, all of that, and it’s just as, if not quieter. And the final reason for you to go buy one of these right now is the price. Corsair’s current cheapest H100i, the “Platinum” is selling for £102, with the newer “Elite Capellix” selling for £130. This? Just £92. And it’s better. Sure, you don’t get any RGB lighting, but I’m sure the £40 you’d save buying this over the ELITE CAPELLIX can go towards some RGB fans or strips if you care. Overall, while the mounting method may mean this isn’t going to become my new test cooler, I would be more than happy to run this in my own PC and I think is likely my new go-to recommendation for an AIO CPU cooler. Good job ARCTIC.
