THE ULTIMATE LIQUID COOLER – Arctic Liquid Freezer-II 360 A-RGB Review
This is hands down the best all in one liquid cooler I’ve tested. It comes in at £40 less than Corsair’s 360mm RGB cooler, runs insanely cool AND quiet! I’m genuinely blown away by this thing, so let’s have a look at it so you can see exactly what I mean!
First, a look at what you get in the box. The cooler itself, which comes with all three fans pre-installed and wired – which is absolutely amazing by the way – and all the mounting hardware you’ll need to mount it to most modern Intel sockets, or AMD’s AM4. Sadly there isn’t a bracket or mount for AMD’s Threadripper – although Intel’s now aging 2066 socket is supported just fine. You even get a tiny tube of their new MX-5 thermal paste.
As for the cooler itself, it’s a chonker. It’s a 38mm thick radiator, compared to the usual 28mm or so, so when you add a 3x120mm layout to that thickness… It’s pretty hefty! The fans are their P12 PWM A-RGB pressure oriented fans, which as I said come pre-installed. I wish more companies would do that, it’s such a nice thing to find as you crack open the box. The fans have an interesting design, opting for a ring around the edge linking each blade together made of the same semi-translucent plastic as the blades making for a rather nice style when paired with the RGB LEDs onboard.
One of the absolute best things they’ve done here is not only pre-installed the fans, but they connected all the cables up (including adding heat shrink tubing over the pesky RGB connectors that always slip apart), then routed those cables down the sleeving of one of the tubes. Those cables run all the way down the tubing – which is a reasonable but certainly not excessive length, covered in a nice enough plastic weave tube – then they go into the pump. This means as far as you are concerned, as it comes out of the box, you only have two wires to deal with. Two! For a 360mm A-RGB AIO! Corsair would have you using their commander pro module with two wires PER FAN, plus another two from the AIO AND SATA power! This is a serious benefit, and is one of my favourite features on my usual go-to, the Fractal Design S24.
The pump block is a pretty unusual shape, a bit like a beetle if you squint, but the magic is this little guy, a 40mm fan that when mounted correctly draws cool air in from the centre and spits it out over your VRMs. That’s one of the big drawbacks with AIO coolers in general, as with a stock cooler air gets exhausted out the sides of the cooler and blows admittedly now warm air over your VRM heatsinks. With a regular AIO you just have to hope you’ve got enough passive airflow from your top or rear fans to keep them cool – but with this it’s actively cooling them.
You may be worried, seeing a tiny little fan like that, thinking it’s going to be a high pitch squealer but happily that’s not the case. In fact, even under load I think I heard the GPU and front case fans considerably more than this absolute monster. Even the tiny 40mm fan is PWM controlled and is barely ticking over most of the time. Even if it has to increase the fan and pump speeds to keep up with your CPU boosting it’s heart out, it’s still such a minor difference that you really, really don’t notice it.
Speaking of the CPU, I’ve been testing with a Ryzen 5900X, which at stock will pump out 142W of power that needs cooling. Just to see if this thing will even break a sweat, I also tested with Precision Boost Overdrive enabled with 185W PPT, 125A EDC and 170A TDC. The results… probably won’t surprise you. At stock, while rendering the Gooseberry scene in Blender it sat in the high 60°c to low 70°c range with an incredibly consistent temperature throughout the run. Even in Cinebench R23 running on repeat for 30 minutes it sat right around the 70°c mark. For context, most 240mm AIOs with a similar setup would be running at 80-85°c here so this is incredible.
I should note I’m using the “Ryzen 3000/5000 optimised” positioning, basically instead of aligning the cold plate “as normal” on the CPU, this lowered pattern moves the centre of the cold plate closer to the core dies on Ryzen 3000/5000 CPUs. It does mean a small portion of the top side of the CPU won’t have any direct contact with the cooler, and there will be a small lip of the cold plate not touching anything, but it can offer a couple degrees cooler temps assumedly thanks to the microfins on the inside of the cold plate are better aligned for heat transfer closer to the centre, or just the flow pattern means more efficient transfer happens closer to the centre.
With PBO enabled and the 5900X now storming through 185W of power, the Liquid Freezer does let that temperature slip… to just a couple of degrees higher. In the same Blender Gooseberry render it sat at 76°c with a slow rise up to a peak of 80°c. Most coolers wouldn’t cope with this level of sustained power draw, especially without ramping their fans up like mad. There was an audible difference in the Freezer’s fan speed with PBO enabled, but it was still significantly quieter than the H100i Pro I have on my 5900X in my main system all while maintaining a much lower temperature and with a lower CPU power level.
In Cinebench R23, on repeat for 30 minutes, it sat comfortably at 77°c after climbing rather slowly there. The fan noise was barely above idle, all while the 5900X was choking down 185W rendering on repeat. That’s absolutely incredible.
Clearly this is an amazing cooler, it does a great job at keeping any CPU it fits on cool. So, what’s the catch? In short, the mounting method. Now I should make it clear that if you are a normal builder who doesn’t swap out their CPU or motherboard often, this is going to be passable but it’s far from ideal. Specifically for AMD’s Ryzen CPUs and the AM4 socket, you’ll need to screw the vertical bars to the pump/block unit with a single screw in the centre of each, then instead of using the same mounting method as every other CPU cooler which is just screwing in 4 standoffs into the existing AMD backplate and placing the cooler down on top and using four thumbscrews to secure it in place, no instead you have to install these extension brackets.
They only go on one way round, so make sure you notice the pretty minor difference in shape between them to tell you which is which, then you’ve got to use these loose-fitting plastic spacer rings, sandwich them between the board and the bracket, then fish a thin screw through all of that and use a screwdriver to tighten it down, then fit the other spacer ring as it’ll have fallen out or over already, and install the other screw. Repeat that for the other side, and pray to tech Jesus the brackets aren’t so wide that they are touching your VRMs, or interfere with RAM or M.2 slots or their heatinks, or anything else in a square mile radius of your CPU.
This is an infuriating process, and ruins all of the other amazing setup-easing features like the pre-installed and cable managed fans. If you are only going to be installing this once, it’s not the end of the world, and you can make it easier by only removing one of the stock backplate brackets at a time meaning the backplate won’t fall off while you are getting these horrible things installed. With that said, it’s a pretty bad solution to a problem everyone else has already solved without much problem. Please ARCTIC just use standoffs you screw into the board and include different arms to go on the pump instead of this nonsense.
So, what’s the verdict? Well, despite the absolutely painful mounting method and the online-only manuals that don’t work on my unit, it takes me to a page that just 404’s, has an unavoidable popup asking if they can use cookies to track me and no matter what option you pick it’ll then refresh the page before you can navigate anywhere else, in an endless cycle. Despite that, the performance, convenience and sound level this offers is really pretty second to none. It’s a beast, and one you can pick up for £40 less than Corsair’s 360mm RGB option, or actually for £5 less than their 280mm RGB option too. Plus, if the fairly nice RGB fans just don’t do it for you and you’d prefer the standard model, well that’s just £95, or £15 less for what is otherwise the exact same cooler. Either option offers an almost irresistible value proposition, and while the mounting method for AMD is naff, the rest easily makes up for it.
This gets an easy, solid recommendation from me, and if you do want to pick one up, or check out pricing when and where you watch this do take a look at the top link in the description below. That’ll be an Amazon Affiliate link which will take you to your local Amazon store where you can check this out. Now, those are my thoughts, but I’d love to hear yours in the comments down below!
