Review on 🌬️ ARCTIC Liquid Freezer II 280 - High-performance All-in-One CPU AIO Water Cooler, Intel & AMD Compatible, PWM Controlled Pump, Fan Speed: 200-1700 RPM - Black by Darrell Shreves

-------------------- TL/DR: --------- -- -- -- ------------ The CPU temperature drops by 20+C during the game! Mid-teens crash while idling. Exceptional performance with near-silent fans at 100% speed (chassis on the ground 3ft). At 100%, the fans would not be audible if there were other sounds in the room at a reasonable level. It's the gentle sound of rushing air (btw I use 3 filters on the inlet and 1 on the outlet). By the way, it would be nice, albeit quietly, to sleep with white noise. My MS Surface laptop fan just arrived and at arm's length from me it got louder than these fans at 100% at 3ft. I would say it's impressive. My impressions of Arctic: This is a small manufacturer who decided to put in some R&D to create and sell great products without the marketing effort of others. Arctic has 120/240/360 and 280 models, buy one if it suits your needs, you'll probably be impressed. (And yes, there is a connector under the CPU pump housing if you need to turn off the VRM fan)-----------Full review + 2 updates----------- ------ --------------------------------- Why a nut miracle? The CPU pump body has only one nut! Like a sane person he should have two, and in fact he needs two. Suffice it to say that it looks big and gorgeous. And by big I mean big. The YouTube review called it "Optimus Prime's Piece of Cod" and yes, that's pretty accurate! :DI probably should have gotten 240. Luckily I have a moving HD mount that I had to move back to the last mount to allow for the install. It will be impressive when I get a replacement. From what I can say it looks very solid and we will. The hoses are really long, the braid looks great, and the pump housing definitely looks like a hunk of Optimus Prime cod, as one YouTube reviewer joked. The packaging is very good, although the box looks a bit standard. But let's face it, save $20 designing/printing a prettier box and charge me $20 less, yes I will! me. I really don't want to go back and then change my booking as I don't have an extra room in my ATM. Please step forward Artic 🥰UPDATE #1 Support replied to my email late Thursday evening early Friday and an hour later received approval to ship me a new unit along with a shipping label for the return of the first unit. So I hope to get a new block on Monday or Tuesday. continue. UPDATE #2 I received the replacement on Tuesday, the date I assumed it would arrive based on the shipping speed of the original item. Thankfully, this device is a two-nut wonder and I was able to install it successfully. So now that it works for me, with some real comments. Installation: The device is very large and a bit bulky, but that is exactly what you would expect from an AIO CLC cooler of this size. Fortunately, due to a failed initial installation, I had already reorganized my case and only had to remove the 2 front fans and the AMD cooler. The fans need to be flipped as I need to use the unit in pull mode and it comes from the factory in push mode (the manual shows top mount versus front mount is expected. Just a question mark, it seemed when would have been the pump head connected to the hoses upside down as the natural ark of the hoses seemed to want to point the VRM fan towards the GPU (in hindsight I had to set it to blow air towards the back of the GPU as my board the VRMs (AC Carbon Pro) Unfortunately I installed it with the fan facing the VRM and it was a little tricky as the back plate didn't stay in place and I put the box the pump came in under a case had to put in place to hold the panel so I could screw the screws in. Performance: That's the most important thing to most How good is it Does it work? The short answer is hell! Before installing I have I have one few benchmarks made and observed the CPU temperature while playing. Normally the CPU is 70-80C when playing at 4150MHz (R5 3600 with stock AMD vs clock). I also ran in "quiet" mode with the CPU clocked down to 2800. In games, the CPU ran to around 50 with minimal FPS drop. In both bench tests, the return is around 2 - 5 FPS. The Heaven test showed a difference of less than 2 frames per second between this speed and the maximum value of 4150. Also tested with the integrated AC Odyssey test. Here the difference is 5 frames per second. Temperatures: Idle - typing, silent, temperature 36 °C, fan 20% / 365 rpm. In Heaven with an AMD cooler, the base temperature is 45°C, and 57°C in the test. The AC280 idled at 34 °C and peaked at 42.3 °C. So under load, before the temperature was reached, the AMD cooler was idle. At MAX CPU frequency (note that the Heaven or AC Odyssey test program is still running when I change the CPU settings), Heaven on the AMD cooler was 52°C when idling, while the test was 52°C maximum temperature averaging 74°C in the mid 60s. On AC280, idle 39, the maximum was 60.1, but the average is 50 or less. AC Odyssey, AMD's silent mode cooler, has an idle of 50, a maximum of 63 and an average temperature between 60 and 62 ° C. With maximum CPU speed, idle 52, maximum 85.9, average mid-70s with more Peaks to over 80. On AC 280, idle CPU 37, max 48, average 41-43 (so 20C less than stock!). at max CPU idle 40-42 (note the CPU fan shows 1500rpm and 100% which doesn't match my fan curves so I'm not sure. I can kinda hear the fans even though they not as quiet as white noise that I play in my sleep) . The maximum temperature was 60.9, averaging 53 in the low 50's. So over 20°C colder than stock! Conclusions: Obviously this thing works. If you can get 280 I would recommend it for an extra $10 just because. Otherwise if you can only set 240 I expect the same amazing performance. WARNING, the Arctic Radiator is approximately 50% thicker than most other brands. This device requires space. The build quality is surprising considering the packaging looks like standard low cost OEM. I like that they spend more money on R&D than on marketing. Let word of mouth do your marketing. Bravo. I would also like to give some other preliminary results. Set my processor to balanced (default mode 3600MHz), temperature 32°C, fan 35% (front cover removed). The temperature went up 1°C when I put the lid back on. If you set the mode to Silent (2800 MHz), the fan performance is reduced to 20%, the temperature fluctuates between 32/33. When set to Extreme/Max (4151 MHz), temperatures climb to 38 C with 100% fan. Using the custom fan curve, the CPU is still at 4151, the temp hits 38, then jumps to 48, then drops to 38, then rises again. Maybe my curve needs some adjustment now. At 38 the fans run at 37%, at 48 at 50%. You will not be heard at all. The fans on my Surface 2 work laptop run louder (they turned on when these fans were running at 100% to monitor noise levels). So should this be considered compared to all other CLC monoblocks on the market? If you don't care about RGB, then yes. If you want RGB, buy others unless you need that big a wheel. It's clear that Arctic is following the Hyundai/Kia model and producing a good product with a better warranty than the standard product, while paying minimal marketing dollars spends to keep costs lower than anyone else in the market and word of mouth handles its marketing. Arctic now guarantee their fans for 10 years and although they only get 2 years, still 2 years for something this complicated with their own internal pump design, not the same old remanufactured pump that everyone else third party uses. You'll be forgiven for thinking that Arctic is Microcenter's signature brand for fans, their boxes are two-tone, blue/yellow, with a bit of a marketing gimmick. I welcome this approach. So, after combining this approach with an exceptional price, I had to give it a try. I don't think I will be disappointed in the long run. I hope not. -------------------- Update July 2021 Still working, absolutely no problems so far. Fantastic cooler. Works 24/7 as I almost never turn off my system.