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The majority of Liquid Coolers on the market today are based around Asetek designs, but the Liquid Freezer II features a pump which was designed in-house by Arctic, with the goal of quieter operation and higher efficiency. Like its fans, the water pump is PWM-controlled and will adjust its speeds. This decreases power consumption and leads to lower noise levels in lighter workloads.
While it was fairly easy with previous generations of CPUs for coolers to keep the flagship i9 processor well under TJ max (the maximum temperature a CPU can sustain without throttling) in tough workloads, this is no longer realistically possible with the Core i9-13900K without extreme cooling (or enabling power limits). While in the past a CPU hitting its peak temperature was cause for concern, enthusiasts are going to have to learn to accept high temperatures as “normal” while running demanding workloads with Raptor Lake and Ryzen 7000 CPUs.I run a similar setup as some here. I have a cooler master H500M and run an Arctic liquid freezer II 360 v2 with 6 Noctua NF-A12x25 fans in a pull/push configuration. Right now I have the pump lead from the arctic freezer going to the AIO 4 pin port on my Asus Maximus XII Formula board. I then have each of the 2 sets of 3 radiator fans strung together with a couple noctua fan splitters to plug each set of 3 into the cpu fan and cpu opt fan (NOT into the Arctic Freezer II’s integrated harness). Not a big deal since laying the board flat on the table bypasses it, but this could be even easier if Arctic refined the solution with cap screws. On the installation front, buyers should also be aware of the short cables for the fans. They can be connected to the splitter cable (which is sleeved alongside the tubes), but we prefer connecting our fans directly to the motherboard to exercise more control over the fans. This is easily solved with some 4-pin-to-4-pin extension cables. Conclusion The next is that this AIO actually concerns itself with cooling the motherboard VRMs and not just the CPU. Unlike most, the Liquid Freezer II 360 comes with a secondary (or to be accurate quaternary) cooling fan that actively cools your motherboard’s VRM heatsink(s). Yes, this is not the first to do so, but it is very rare. The vast, vast majority of AIOs do not. This configuration allows me to monitor and control fan speeds and curves. The pump speed is completely obfuscated because I have a v2, but it is plugged into the AIO port on my mobo so should be getting 100% power.
Thermal imaging from our FLIR ONE Pro camera shows moderate heat soak around the radiator sides and within coolant tubing at 50% fan speed, while 100% fan speed shows good regulation and exchange of thermal load. Given that the Arctic Liquid Freezer II 280 runs so quietly, operating the unit with a good PWM curve should allow for aggressive fan speed without excess system noise.If your fans have a combined total of >1 amp, or you want to control the fans separately from the pump, just hook them to whatever hub or headers you want and control them that way, then tie the harness somewhere out of the way.
A) it would greatly benefit from upgraded high static pressure fans and/or a push/pull fan configuration Modern AMD & Intel CPUs are designed to run fairly hot without any problems– up to 95 degrees Celsius for AMD Ryzen 7000 CPUs, and up to 100 degrees C for Intel’s Core i9-13900K. Similar behavior has been standard in laptops for years due to cooling limitations in cramped chassis. Edit: and yes, similar to OP, I am OCD and need to have every fan in my case match (noctua for me). In addition to testing Cinebench without power limits enforced, we’ll also be showing results when the CPU’s power consumption is limited to a more reasonable 200W. We’ll also show results at 125W for those who prefer whisper-quiet cooling, at the cost of some performance. For both of these results, we’ll show traditional delta over ambient temperature results. Arctic has built, thus far, a good product. We need to see how it does long-term, as Enermax has scared us away from firm recommendations on thermals alone. We would recommend the Arctic Liquid Freezer II 280 as a go-to solution over competing liquid coolers, based on thermal and acoustic performance, although we’d also note that most proven (e.g. Asetek, CoolIT) coolers will perform similarly. If you want RGB LEDs, you’re mostly just paying more for them, but should be in the ballpark for performance.This shows the delta in height, measured in microns, from a calibrated 0-point. The A500’s box plot shows the largest range, illustrating the chaotic levelness that hurt its performance, while the Deepcool Assassin III and original Wraith coolers have some of the best levelness. The Arctic Liquid Freezer II averaged about 8-10 microns depth from the 0-point, with minimums and maximums at 2 microns and 48 microns. The Liquid Freezer II has a couple deep points in the coldplate, but is overall closer to the smooth end than the unlevel end. Installation & Mounting The next test will be for the VRM fan. For this, we’re going to start with an overlay demonstrating the linear feet per minute flow, often called FPM or LPM, as measured with a hotwire anemometer at the edge of the chassis for the cooler. The measurement is taken at an angle toward the VRM heatsink. We measured at a few points and under a few conditions. Our next chart continues with the 3950X 200W load, but allows all the coolers to run at 100% fan speed during the test. This doesn’t move the needle much for Arctic, which seems to top-out in its efficiency at around 1200RPM rather than its maximum 1600RPM. The results were +/-1C as usual, but our average ended up at 50.9 degrees over ambient. That’s not enough of a change, so there’s room to reduce noise level without much loss of overall performance. At the 1610RPM speed, the Arctic cooler ran at 42.5dBA at the normal 20” distance. This puts it about equal in thermal performance to the NZXT Kraken X62 and X72, which run around 51-53dBA, or a perceived noise increase to the human ear of about 2x. Again, that’s perceived to the human ear, not acoustic power, which is a different scale. Either way, Arctic’s solution is significantly quieter at the same performance. The EVGA CLC 360 shows that we’re not limited by our test bench, but also that jet engine levels of noise are needed to drive the temperature down further. 3800X – 35dBA
The nature of a review cycle (while a product is relevant) typically dictates that there’s no means to realistically test for endurance or age. We can revisit in the future if needed, but that’s the only question mark left after the review process: Arctic’s pump design is new, something we’ll look at in our tear-down video coming up shortly, and a new design means we have no reference point for endurance and reliability. In general, liquid coolers outlive the usable life of the system, and potentially two systems, but those that fail do so in a much more visible or catastrophic fashion. Failures are overall rare, however, and that’s always important to note. We’ll send you to our Air vs. Liquid cooler content for more of an explanation on this front. Time to move to VRM thermals. Before putting this chart up, a few important points: First, this is all relative, so our measurement points aren’t designed to test the motherboard, but rather to test the cooling capabilities of the CPU cooler on top of it. We’re taking VRM measurements at points that will work better for testing cooler impact, since we don’t care about comparative VRM performance from one board to the next. Second, we’ll show the numbers with the radiator mounted to the side of the bench. That’s how we tested all the liquid coolers so far, as it is more similar to a top-mounted radiator in a case. This means there’s always airflow over the VRM heatsink in all the CLC tests, whereas testing it on the table, away from the VRM, would paint a picture of Arctic’s VRM fan having a higher relative impact since you’d be taking away all cooling otherwise. We have these numbers too, but let’s focus on 3950X OC numbers at 35dBA radiator fan speed first, with the Arctic VRM fan at 100%. The test is also tough to standardize since every motherboard will have different heatsinks and positioning, so although you can mostly extrapolate out a hierarchy, it’s not perfectly comparable to every configuration. And again, please also remember that case configuration is the single most impacting to VRM thermal performance outside of the VRM design and cooling solution. What we’re saying is that this test will create an objective hierarchy, but that in all reality, a couple degrees here-and-there from the cooler won’t really matter much when considering the VRM is unlikely to melt itself in the majority of instances. The increased cooling challenges posed by Raptor Lake mean that we’ve had to change some of the ways we test coolers. Some coolers were able to pass Cinebench R23 multicore testing with Intel’s 12th Gen i9-12900K when power limits were removed (although only the strongest models were able to pass that test). The VRM fan clearly does something, and temperature improvements will follow the more even FPM on either side of the VRM heatsink, but we also want to be clear that a top-mounted radiator would also benefit the VRM. This is something we simulate in our test setup. VRM Thermals
Motherboard Compatibility
B) it will be difficult to run a push/pull due to the sheer size of the radiator depending on your case. I BARELY got it all to fit.
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