With the second profile my 5800X rarely hits 72C, only thing I hear from my case is the air been pushed trough from all my other fans, I can hear that little fan if I open it and put my ear close to it though. Excellent cooling, Very quiet and Amazing Value Literally the only slight issue I had with this cooler is the AMD mounting system, where a third hand would help. That low-speed capability all the way down to 200 RPM is particularly impressive, especially if your system’s idling or low load temperatures allow for such operation. I still feel that Arctic missed an opportunity by not making the VRM fan LED lit also, but the clean cable management thanks to just two trailing wires is absolutely superb. Arctic cooling’s Liquid Freezer II came right in time for Zen 2 system builds toward end of 2019, but that was when we were in the middle of upgrading our testing methods.

Leaving the radiator are two closely mounted fibre-reinforced, EPDM tubes that measure in at 450mm long. Because all mechanical dimensions remain identical, we are able to ensure the compatibility of ARCTIC coolers with AMD's new processors.

The dimensions are 317 mm × 138 mm × 38 mm, which is not typical, as it’s slightly thicker than other solutions on the market.

Only issue i had with installation was the pump mounting bracket was hitting the thermal heatshield covering my NVME drive below it so it had to be removed to get the bracket in place, it does not seem to have affected the performance of my NVME in any way. The 3800X was intended to be our standardized platform before we got to these higher-end coolers, the charts level-off a bit with the big air coolers.This is our time to steady state at a noise-normalized 35-dBA, or the time at which we reach equilibrium. My cooler had some kind of incorrect threading on one of mounting brackets which required a large amount of force to screw in (100% sure I was using the correct screws - which both worked fine on the opposite side). Small fans have the reputation of being particularly loud and not very durable; that’s why we set out to develop a quiet, sturdy diagonal fan especially for the Liquid Freezer II. And, like the Liquid Freezer II’s fans, the water pump is PWM-controlled and adjusts its speed accordingly. This makes installation easy and tidy: you only have to connect one connector to the mainboard, and there are no other cables to hide.

Let's check out how well they do with the Arctic Liquid Freezer II 360 A-RGB, fitted with a 360mm radiator, silent cooling, and new aRGB fans. Interestingly, the three fans are connected to each other via a daisy-chain approach that is pre-routed. We work on test benches and don’t unseat the motherboard for cooler installation, so this isn’t perfectly representative unless you install the board in the case before the cooler, in which case you’d experience a similar annoyance.This means it consumes less power and produces less noise, even with its additional fan for VRM cooling. 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. 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. Since the Raptor Lake 13900K actively adjusts in a way that seeks its top safe temperature, we’ll compare performance instead by looking at total benchmark scores and clock speeds maintained.

For this one, we’re using a 200W workload with the AMD R9 3950X, which is more useful for stressing the differences in high-end coolers. Note that the best frequency doesn’t mean it’s the coolest – it becomes more touchy, since frequency jumps around to begin with, and because a better cooler means Precision Boost 2 will kick into higher frequency, which creates more heat. 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 ends up as the top-performer on the bench when noise-normalized to 35dBA across the board.

The Liquid Freezer II 360 aRGB has integrated cable management within fully sleeved tubes for a clean look in your PC’s case. This leads to a slower and an up to 5 °C lower temperature increase in the time-limited turbo mode of modern CPUs. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. We need to see how it does long-term, as Enermax has scared us away from firm recommendations on thermals alone. This allows a larger amount of water to be used in the circuit and significantly increases the cooling surface area.