The New Best - Arctic Liquid Freezer III 360 & 280 CPU Cooler Review & Benchmarks

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis is the brand new Arctic liquid friezer 3 and it does this that's the pump cap with the vrm fan in it and they also Force an Intel contact frame and the liquid freezer 3 follows up the best cooler overall that we've tested in the last four years which is the liquid freezer 2 sequential numbering and in the four years since we crowned it our test capabilities have grown this review features lasers to try and root cause a particular pressure problem we found it features our Hemi an aoic chamber for Acoustics and it features mik complaining about the installation so once those are threaded before that this video is brought to you by montech and the k95 pro case the k95 pro is a dual chamber enclosure with configurable options for storage and power supplies the k95 has a deep 35mm cable channel for management support for dual power supplies if you want it which could be useful for a thread system and ample radiator and fan mounting options scattered around the top back bottom side and front of the case the front also can be mesh or solid with the mesh running a higher paracity for more breathability learn more at the link in the description below for a quick list of the interesting features so first of all the pump cap the top here it looks like a fan but that's actually that's not a fan it's just decoration the actual fan is inside and here it is significantly larger than the prior one which should help for thals next Arctic decided to force AMD offset mounting with its AMD installation kit that's a good thing this means it'll offset the coal plate down on the IHS so you'll actually see a little bit of an AMD IHS sort of showing through when you remove the pump cap that means leaving some surface area on the table but it moves the densest part of the microfins Clos to the chiplets they're also forcing use of a contact frame for Intel this is a huge change now in theory making the frame and being in control of the cold plate which they are should make for the best possible pressure and contact distribution across an IHS that you could get if you buy something like thermal Grizzly or thermal right they're just selling you the frame so being able to mate the cold plate to a particular frame that is a strength that the others don't currently have other than maybe water blocks or thermal Grizzly uh and it's something we hope that Arctic is able to leverage properly spoiler alert it's not perfect this pump cap changes for a couple of reasons first is to change the mounting hardware to be easier to access while also including this leaf spring another change another reason to do it this way is to make the products a lot easier to repair and maintain so for warranty and RMA purposes a user now wouldn't need to disassemble the housing to replace a failed vrm fan instead you'd get a replacement unit and you would need a replacement fan for a failure anyway so the excess plastic isn't too bad and now it can also be done without removing the cooler from the the board which we think is a great maintenance feature the PCB under the pump cap is also meticulously label and has exposed probe points which is great for troubleshooting and advanced users we'll talk more about the construction and our tear down coming up in the next couple days though so subscribe and check back for the teod down actually this is also a change the pump cap lights up now uh and for pricing they have them set at $130 for the liquid freezer 3 360 black that's the main one we're testing today pricing for the argb version the liquid freezer 3 360 is $150 it's $120 for the liquid freezer 3 280 black model 140 for the argb variant and then it's 140 for the liquid freezer 3420 black as well they'll also have a 240 model but generally we try to stay 280 and up for liquid these days arctic's biggest competition right now is probably itself presumably because they're trying to vacate the inventory the liquid freezer 2420 can be had for $92 that's the previous model on Amazon right now the the 280 was at $82 other competition which we tested today includes the Deep cool Mystique coming up and the lean Le Trinity line when they're not busy dealing with RMA issues let's get into the data our thermal testing will start at 200 watts and noise normalized between all the tested coolers we have a few liquid freezer 3 entries on this chart one has the pump speed reduced to 70% with the fan speed slightly increased to still hit the noise normalized Target another is with the pump speed at 100% which meant slightly lower fan speed because the pump is consuming more of that noise budget so to speak finally we have one with the same settings but the vrm fan disabled that one's not shown here that'll be for the vrm fan comparisons and then there's the 280 RGB version of the liquid freezer 3 the liquid freezer 3 360 is the new chart leader so it's doing well there it's up at 46.7 De C over ambient and that has it as the technical best technical here because it's only leading the brand new deep cool Mystique 3 60 by margin of error they're basically the same for performance between these you'd buy on other features like looks ease of installation vrm Cooling and most likely the price and the value the new liquid freezer 3 360 outperforms the prior liquid freezer 2420 even when that one had its offset bracket which is an impressive place for Arctic to land the lean Lee Trinity performance is even behind the new liquid freezer 3 and the Mystique coolers and that's a cooler that performed well for a 360 as for the 280 model model it held about 50° average and landed alongside the non-offset mounted 420 liquid freezer forcing the offset mount for AMD on the liquid freezer 3 was a good choice because the offset mounting always worked well Arctic is doing well for performance as is deep cool with the Mystique and now we need to look at 100% fan speed performance before moving on to vrm thermals 100% fan speed has the liquid freezer 3 at about 40 DBA when using our non-chamber methods and test it at 20 in remember that noise is totally relative to how it's tested so what matters is the comparison to other devices in the same test if you hold your phone up with the DBA app in the same room the data is completely meaningless and is not comparable to this data of those at the top of this list Arctic is the most efficient as a result of its high ranking performance while maintaining sometimes significantly lower noise levels that makes sense when considering the noise normalized results being so strong previously the liquid freezer 3360 ran at 45° over ambient while in 40 DBA most of the devices surrounding it run at minimally 50 DBA with some even louder than that and as a reminder in Psycho Acoustics every 10 DBA increase is roughly a doubling in noise that the human ear perceives not to be confused with acoustic power that's impressive performance for the liquid fuser 3 because anything at 55 DBA in this example would be perceived about two times louder alongside the ga2 Trinity series the Mystique is among the newest coolers here these both perform one to 2° better but while running significantly louder the 56 DBA result for the Trinity performance is comparatively deafening when matched against the liquid freezer 3 compared to the prior liquid freezer 2 360 at a similar fan RPM and before the offset Mount the new unit is slightly quieter and also 4° cooler that's an impressive uplift the liquid freezer 3280 runs at 46.6 De over ambient here about tide with the prior 420 cooler and we'll need to do a tear down to fully explore where all these improvements come from that'll be separate video the original day one liquid freezer 2280 ran at almost equal noise levels making it a clean like for- like comparison that one was 50.9 de over ambient without the offset Mount we're back in the lab again testing fpm again we're using a Hotwire anomet to look at the linear feet per minute flow known as fpm or LPM if you prefer of the vrm fan so previously four years ago we verified that liquid freezer 2 was in fact not a gimmick it actually did something the way to test the vrm fan is too fold really there's uh thermals which is the obvious and there's just air flow cuz if the air is flowing over it it's doing something uh so for this testing we position a hot wire anemometer in fixed and carefully noted location so that we get the exact same positioning each time between the liquid freezer 2 and the liquid freezer 3 this data is not comparable to the data we collected in 2020 we've slightly repositioned things but everything going on the charts today and in the image it's directly comparable here's a quick and simplified overview map of the motherboard with the pump block overlaid on top of it this shows only the flow of each measurement point with the vrm fan on and the radiator fans off and it compares the liquid freezer 2 and 3 360 options directly the liquid freezer 3 is always the top entry for the text with a two as the bottom this is with each fan at its full speed and the results are directly comparable using our new hot wire anemometer testing updated from the last time as for fan RPM the new fan Max is out at 2500 rpm broad observations are that the liquid a 3 vrm Fan seems to mostly direct its air toward the top right and the mid left the 488 fpm and 425 fpm results are very high and indicate significantly higher flow in these areas than elsewhere where the vrm Fan's air flow stays at around 110 to 165 fpm the original vrm fan more evenly split its air flow between the top right the upper left and the bottom left regions but at significantly lower flow rates than the new fan when both are at 100% speed it also had a weak spot in the top left as a result of the old mounting hardware blocking air flow to this region from the vrm fan and the liquid freezer 3 resolves this overall the liquid freezer 3's air flow is hitting the correct areas the center left is probably the most important that's where a lot of heat builds up because you often have your 10 gbit Nick over there too so there's a lot of shared PCB area in that region that heats up and then some extra flow up in the top right helps with any vrm components that are up north of the board especially where the heat sink typically is located one final observation is that the bottom left inductor gets less flow with the new liquid freezer 3 vrm Fan than the older one however uh not shown here but the liquid freezer 3's fan can reach a little bit below that whereas the two gets cut off by the chassis this simple chart shows the reduction in temperature so a bigger bar is better and means a larger impact zero would be the performance with the vrm fan off with VM fans at their maximum speeds the new liquid freezer 3 post significantly higher total cooling header for vrm components it manages a 7° reduction on Moss zero which is huge and two 6.3 reductions for the other fats this is a clear Improvement for Arctic and the new fan is definitely working we'll quickly do some testing in our Hemi anaco chamber we have a whole separate build video on this in the channel if you're curious about its construction what it costs all that stuff we'll link it below but this testing is again focused on the pump and the VM fan that's cuz those two components changed more significantly so for this testing we're positioning the the mic relatively close to the pump cap for the cooler and that's because we want to really capture the noises of it for comparison purposes we're also toggling off any of the radiator fans during this testing so it's strictly going to look at the liquid freezer 2 pump and vrm fan versus the liquid freezer 3 pump and vrm fan here's the chart in this Benchmark you can see that when both fans and pumps are at maximum speed so we're not normalizing for the vrm fan speed we're just letting them run flat out the new pump and fan combo at 100% definitely runs louder in fact the perceived increase to the human ear is nearing two times louder as for frequency spectrum the new pump and fan have a spike around the 5,000 HZ range we'll listen for this in a moment and compared to the predecessor there's a louder bump in the 1800 HZ range to help illustrate what these noises sound like we're going to play back two samples but this is important so first of all the testing is done in this environment with a high quality microphone 10 inches away from the product under test that's not how you're going to use it the noises will sound louder to you in your headphones where I'm going to have to boost the audio as well so it comes through at the same level as my voice here so for demonstration purposes what we're trying to show you is the two types of noise but the volume of them as we're going to play it through your speakers or headphones that will be about equal for the actual noise level difference you can see that the frequency spectrum plot so listen for the type of noise and remember that if all the fans in your system like GPU fans are active you probably won't hear the noises that these make however if it's relatively passive and on desktop you probably will hear the noise that it makes that's how you should draw the distinction otherwise just try to identify which one annoys you more here's the liquid freezer too and these precise Clips are not what we sampled for the plot and here's the liquid freezer 3 the three has more pump noise coming through which contributes a lot to the noise difference overall one thing we can't account for in a short test period as in the scale of weeks we're on is how the pump noise settles acoustically though at 100% speeds for the pump and the fan the new one is definitely louder in a demonstrable way versus the original our pressure scans will start with the new Intel LGA 1700 contact frame since it's the most unique aspect of this cooler we conducted four passes for the 360 but we're only going to show two cuz they're all the same uh first on the left we have the Intel stock ilm when using the liquid freezer 2420 the same one we used to debut our contact frame analysis almost 2 years ago now and we can't use the liquid freezer 3 here because once again it doesn't have an is mounting option it's only the frame they include the Intel stock ilm was sorely lacking in pressure on the bottom edge of the CPU with the right Edge pointed toward the vrm Intel is weak here overall and has its pressure in the wrong places next the thermal Grizzly frame that sort of validated and created this Market Smooths over the contact across the entirety of the IHS there's some gaps towards the io board side at the top but the distribution is significantly better than the ilm from Intel and is more Central which is where the die is the cheaper thermal right frame is next with the first pass Distributing more pressure across the entire IHS but with some weaker areas a remount improved pressure and produced actually the best scan yet but as we discussed in our review of the thermal right frame its downside is the sometimes less precise installation process that can result in variable outcomes and here's the liquid freezer 3 it's defin ly not as good as the thermal right or thermal Grizzly frames but it is improved over the stock ilm some of that could be contributed by the cold plate too but we can't isolate that variable because there's only one option for mounting which is the included Arctic frame Arctic is lacking pressure on the lawn sides of the CPU and likely due to the cold plate Behavior also has a weak spot of pressure about 8 mm in from the CPU side nearest the vrm and that's oriented right on this image you can see that almost Channel form between between the right edge of the CPU in this shot and the rest of it this consistently appeared including in an entirely different unit with the 280 that leads us to believe that it's a design issue and not a one-off contact is good centrally and it is better than the stock ilm but there's a lot of room for improvement here we're overall disappointed with the outcome of the pressure because if they're designing the whole cooler around this Frame they have the opportunity to make this better than anyone else's and it just isn't but we'll talk more about that disappointment in the conclusion so make sure to listen to that section to try and understand why this pattern was emerging we took the cold plate to our new $60,000 uh laser scanner that produces 3D images of devices we scan we bought this last year and this is certainly more advanced than our old physical needle probing method this machine has a repeatability of less than one micron and we recently used this in our Billet block review of the monoblock you can check that out on the channel for more background the equipment allows us to not only identif identify a problem which we could already do but to try and pinpoint the cause to better understand it to help fund our efforts and Equipment purchases like this as we're still getting the money back on this one please go to store. Gamers access.net and grab a gn15 metal emblem glass featuring a highquality badge we launch that for the 15th anniversary or you can grab a rugged large modmat for your next PC build or one of our memory explosion diagram t-shirts and thanks for your support here's the scan after adjusting the scan lines and the levelness of the cold pl we eventually ended up with this result without magnifying it everything looks relatively flat we have a maximum Point too Delta of 60 microns but an overall good consistency one point to its adjacent neighbor we were hoping this would reveal that channel that we identified in the LGA 1700 mounting pressure map but because we can't conduct the scan while the Cal plate is mounted to an IHS we can only see the unsprung version when magnified 100 times you can see the channel very slightly in the cold plate at the weak pressure spots we saw previously this is present on both of the units that we tested for pressure the channel is likely amplifying under the spring load of the mount and we now know that the plate is at least partially responsible for the shortcoming not just the mounting hardware and it likely deres from how it's mounted to the pump block we'll investigate that in our separate tear down video coming up now we're going to move on to the LGA 1700 thermals this testing uses a couple of different mounting frames for the liquid freezer 2 which was comp comptible with thermal Grizzly and thermal right and all the others we also test the Mystique with the stock Intel ilm that's the Deep cool solution and then for the liquid freezer 3 it only has one option and that's the Arctic contact frame so we're testing it with that all the testing is done at 100% fan speeds and the noise levels listed the data is not comparable to our previous contact frame testing because we've changed our approach we've changed the power consumption changed some of the voltages that's just because it's been like a year and a half now so let's get into it here's the chart the stock ilms performed the worst for the Arctic test both down at around 63° C over ambient the Mystique also used the Intel stock ilm however at 49 DBA it's able to Brute Force past the limitations and land at the top of the chart anyway the liquid freezer 3 360 with the included Arctic frame had it between two liquid freezer 2420 entries one with the thermal right frame and one with the thermal Grizzly frame these two are within error of each other but are 5 de better than the ilm unfortunately we can't determine how much of the liquid freezer 3's Improvement is from the frame versus the pump and the coal plate changes because again the frame can't be isolated what we can say is that the liquid freezer 3 remains impressively noise efficient at just 40 DBA it's equaling a 45 DBA entry from a significantly larger 420 radiator likewise it's encroaching on the louder Mystique 360 even still deep cool holds a slight Advantage here for thermals against the original 360 with the inm the Improvement is about 5° a noteworthy generational game okay we're going to take a look at the Intel installation first here but before we do that I do want to look at the contact frames and and just point out a few key differences between arctic's frame and uh the other frames on the market so arctic's frame is a lot more like the thermalite frame in the sense that it actually makes contact with the motherboard so if we take a look here the back of the Arctic frame has these two foam pads that will actually be in contact with the motherboard so it makes installation very easy just like the thermalite contact frame and that is in contrast to the thermal Grizzly frame if you want to learn more about those two frames you can look at their respective reviews on our channel so we are going to follow arctic's directives kind of uh step by step just to show you what it would be like for you at home doing this if you don't have a test bench so the first thing they say to do is to place a piece of foam under the motherboard so I I've got a nice piece of anti-static foam I would recommend using something anti-static as well and then we're going to which I've already done we we will place the CPU in the socket and then we're going to remove the stock ilm so the reason they have you put the motherboard down on a piece of foam to support it is the back plate on the other side of this ilm if you did not support it as soon as you took all four of these screws out it would fall off and it makes installing the contact frame uh much more difficult and requiring extra hands and now we're going to place our Arctic contact frame down and they have this contact frame with the marked with the little triangle just like the CPU and of course you want to line those two things up and I'm just going to drop my four screws in so they didn't have any guidance on how heavily to torque these screws um so I would recommend men just going snug just enough to engage that those foam pads on the back of the contact frame so I'm going to rotate this because the tubing on this cooler is actually really stiff and I'll get one side started here all right we got both sides started and now I'm just going to alternate a few turns on each side until I reach a point where they stop and then your final step is just to put on the vrm fan and that goes on uh via magnets so that's very easy to install and you're done so let's take a look at the AMD solution Okay so we've got our AMD board our am5 board here we're going to go ahead and remove our stock brackets that come with the motherboard we going to just place our standoffs there they are just Hollow pieces of plastic there's nothing fancy about them the brackets are are asymmetrical um one is labeled left one is labeled right um left and right respectively is how the motherboard would sit in your compter in a traditional computer so the left is going to go here closer to the vrms away from the RAM and then our right bracket is going closest to the ram here snug those up the reason these are asymmetrical is because Arctic is now forcing the offset uh installation on all AMD users when we reviewed the liquid freezer 2420 um it had two brackets you could do an offset bracket or a traditional bracket that covered the entire IHS the offset bracket in our testing showed uh a temperature reduction so uh I guess Arctic has gone with this the thought that why even bother shipping it with anything else so um that's why these brackets are asymmetrical um I'm going to go ahead and start one side here by hand and then we'll use the screwdriver shove down the other end here so this kind of illustrates and transitions nicely to the one of the criticisms I had of this cooler and it's this leaf spring as cool as it is man it has it makes mounting this on amd's platform very difficult the on the intel on their their contact frame it's actually quite easy and you don't have to compress the spring at all but to get these threaded you have to compress press that spring a little and it's it's kind of tedious to get it threaded so once those are threaded son of dude is this serious right now okay okay now that they're actually threaded we can go ahead and tighten these down until they are snug and stop turning so if we take a look here at the CPU the IHS is almost entirely covered except for these three little legs so you're losing a little bit of surface area but um it's for a good cause the offset will reduce temperatures by moving the cooler part of the cold plate closer to the ccds which is where most of the heat is generated and finally of course you're going to throw on the vrm fan um critiques the AMD installation is a little tedious it can be a little difficult having to compress that leaf spring while you're trying to get the hardware threaded uh is not my favorite feature on a cooler I've spoke about this before uh I like to get things threaded while they're not under tension um Additionally the tubes are very stiff which can make the installation on AMD even more difficult as compared to their Intel installation which was relatively easy and straightforward um and hasslefree so that wraps up the installation segment and now I'm going to throw it back to Steve the conclusion is pretty straightforward so we think that the value and the performance is good overall Arctic however has some key areas where it can improve as it iterates on this product that's sort of how they approach the liquid freezer 2 line where there were small iterative update along the way and hopefully they do that here as well so the base concepts are all working together it's just that the individual Concepts don't always stand out particularly strong on their own and the biggest example of that is the contact frame the price is what impacts value so this has slightly increased for MSRP again we expect competitive sales on these the value remains strongly competitive though in a market flooded with LCD and blaz and coolers that sell closer to $200 these days than where these are so Arctic hasn't forsaken its audience of people who are probably more function first and want the cooling for a good value and that's where the black model comes in at 120 to 130 bucks for the liquid freezer three coolers we think that's good positioning in terms of cooling efficiency at a given noise level our noise normalized testing shows that the liquid freezer 3 is currently the best we've ever tested when at 100% fan speed the liquid freezer 3 360 was performing the same as coolers that were 10 DBA louder which is a massive change in noise level that's where that phrasing efficiency comes from when we're talking about coolers we do have some disappointments though unfortunately the Intel frame just isn't as good as it could be it's better than the the stock ilm but right now with how this is performing in terms of pressure you would basically be better off if Arctic had shipped this with something compatible with the normal ilm bought a thermal right or thermal Grizzly frame but thermal right frame for seven bucks say and then just mounted the liquid freezer 3 to that unfortunately in some ways anyway this is a required part uh so you don't get to do that but and we don't get to thermally test it in a reasonable way against this one because you have to use Arctic with the way they designed it if it were the best we'd ever seen that'd be a different story but we think Arctic has the capability to improve on this they control the coal plate and they control the frame unlike separate frame only solutions it's at least less overall Hardware than the am4 and am5 mounts previously the am51 in particular now the vrm fan is more effective but we found that the combined pump and vrm fan at Max Speed were louder than the predecessor one more side of this that's positive so we review the product not the company but we do consider the company's history because it matters for things like support RMA things like that Arctic is starting to develop a strong Foundation here with the liquid freezer 2 line they had two events specifically that come to mind uh one of them is the offset mounting for AMD that wasn't really discovered until later in the the life cycle a little after the launch of the product it was starting to get some wider discussion online and they eventually made an offset Mount they shipped it and they included it with the later liquid freezer 2o so showing willingness to iteratively improve on it and not just go nope that's the product it's staying that way till the next one that's a good thing the second was an issue we covered in a different video where there were batches of liquid freezer twos that uh could have potential Gunk buildup basically and so what Arctic did was it got in front of the issue it actually notified us before we found it on our own that's always a good thing uh and they started shipping out replacement kits so users could either self-repair them or they could send them in for repair if they felt uncomfortable doing it loved the idea of the self repair kit because it's not hard to do it saves massive amounts of time for the end user not waiting for an RMA H it's also just a lot less waste and shipping so they are starting to prove that they'll support it which is important we need to see that continue of course in the very least it's good value it is the most effective for noise normalized cooling performance that we've looked at uh and they have a couple key areas to work on so uh overall I would say that we can recommend the liquid freezer 3 okay that's it for this one thanks for watching as always subscribe for more to support this content please go to store. Gamers access.net grab a PC Building modmat A solder mat one of our t-shirts coaster packs or any of the other items on the store like our 3D emblem glasswar and that directly helps fund our purchasing of cool equipment like we use in this more pressure contact paper and uh it funds all the testing we do thanks for watching we'll see you all next timethis is the brand new Arctic liquid friezer 3 and it does this that's the pump cap with the vrm fan in it and they also Force an Intel contact frame and the liquid freezer 3 follows up the best cooler overall that we've tested in the last four years which is the liquid freezer 2 sequential numbering and in the four years since we crowned it our test capabilities have grown this review features lasers to try and root cause a particular pressure problem we found it features our Hemi an aoic chamber for Acoustics and it features mik complaining about the installation so once those are threaded before that this video is brought to you by montech and the k95 pro case the k95 pro is a dual chamber enclosure with configurable options for storage and power supplies the k95 has a deep 35mm cable channel for management support for dual power supplies if you want it which could be useful for a thread system and ample radiator and fan mounting options scattered around the top back bottom side and front of the case the front also can be mesh or solid with the mesh running a higher paracity for more breathability learn more at the link in the description below for a quick list of the interesting features so first of all the pump cap the top here it looks like a fan but that's actually that's not a fan it's just decoration the actual fan is inside and here it is significantly larger than the prior one which should help for thals next Arctic decided to force AMD offset mounting with its AMD installation kit that's a good thing this means it'll offset the coal plate down on the IHS so you'll actually see a little bit of an AMD IHS sort of showing through when you remove the pump cap that means leaving some surface area on the table but it moves the densest part of the microfins Clos to the chiplets they're also forcing use of a contact frame for Intel this is a huge change now in theory making the frame and being in control of the cold plate which they are should make for the best possible pressure and contact distribution across an IHS that you could get if you buy something like thermal Grizzly or thermal right they're just selling you the frame so being able to mate the cold plate to a particular frame that is a strength that the others don't currently have other than maybe water blocks or thermal Grizzly uh and it's something we hope that Arctic is able to leverage properly spoiler alert it's not perfect this pump cap changes for a couple of reasons first is to change the mounting hardware to be easier to access while also including this leaf spring another change another reason to do it this way is to make the products a lot easier to repair and maintain so for warranty and RMA purposes a user now wouldn't need to disassemble the housing to replace a failed vrm fan instead you'd get a replacement unit and you would need a replacement fan for a failure anyway so the excess plastic isn't too bad and now it can also be done without removing the cooler from the the board which we think is a great maintenance feature the PCB under the pump cap is also meticulously label and has exposed probe points which is great for troubleshooting and advanced users we'll talk more about the construction and our tear down coming up in the next couple days though so subscribe and check back for the teod down actually this is also a change the pump cap lights up now uh and for pricing they have them set at $130 for the liquid freezer 3 360 black that's the main one we're testing today pricing for the argb version the liquid freezer 3 360 is $150 it's $120 for the liquid freezer 3 280 black model 140 for the argb variant and then it's 140 for the liquid freezer 3420 black as well they'll also have a 240 model but generally we try to stay 280 and up for liquid these days arctic's biggest competition right now is probably itself presumably because they're trying to vacate the inventory the liquid freezer 2420 can be had for $92 that's the previous model on Amazon right now the the 280 was at $82 other competition which we tested today includes the Deep cool Mystique coming up and the lean Le Trinity line when they're not busy dealing with RMA issues let's get into the data our thermal testing will start at 200 watts and noise normalized between all the tested coolers we have a few liquid freezer 3 entries on this chart one has the pump speed reduced to 70% with the fan speed slightly increased to still hit the noise normalized Target another is with the pump speed at 100% which meant slightly lower fan speed because the pump is consuming more of that noise budget so to speak finally we have one with the same settings but the vrm fan disabled that one's not shown here that'll be for the vrm fan comparisons and then there's the 280 RGB version of the liquid freezer 3 the liquid freezer 3 360 is the new chart leader so it's doing well there it's up at 46.7 De C over ambient and that has it as the technical best technical here because it's only leading the brand new deep cool Mystique 3 60 by margin of error they're basically the same for performance between these you'd buy on other features like looks ease of installation vrm Cooling and most likely the price and the value the new liquid freezer 3 360 outperforms the prior liquid freezer 2420 even when that one had its offset bracket which is an impressive place for Arctic to land the lean Lee Trinity performance is even behind the new liquid freezer 3 and the Mystique coolers and that's a cooler that performed well for a 360 as for the 280 model model it held about 50° average and landed alongside the non-offset mounted 420 liquid freezer forcing the offset mount for AMD on the liquid freezer 3 was a good choice because the offset mounting always worked well Arctic is doing well for performance as is deep cool with the Mystique and now we need to look at 100% fan speed performance before moving on to vrm thermals 100% fan speed has the liquid freezer 3 at about 40 DBA when using our non-chamber methods and test it at 20 in remember that noise is totally relative to how it's tested so what matters is the comparison to other devices in the same test if you hold your phone up with the DBA app in the same room the data is completely meaningless and is not comparable to this data of those at the top of this list Arctic is the most efficient as a result of its high ranking performance while maintaining sometimes significantly lower noise levels that makes sense when considering the noise normalized results being so strong previously the liquid freezer 3360 ran at 45° over ambient while in 40 DBA most of the devices surrounding it run at minimally 50 DBA with some even louder than that and as a reminder in Psycho Acoustics every 10 DBA increase is roughly a doubling in noise that the human ear perceives not to be confused with acoustic power that's impressive performance for the liquid fuser 3 because anything at 55 DBA in this example would be perceived about two times louder alongside the ga2 Trinity series the Mystique is among the newest coolers here these both perform one to 2° better but while running significantly louder the 56 DBA result for the Trinity performance is comparatively deafening when matched against the liquid freezer 3 compared to the prior liquid freezer 2 360 at a similar fan RPM and before the offset Mount the new unit is slightly quieter and also 4° cooler that's an impressive uplift the liquid freezer 3280 runs at 46.6 De over ambient here about tide with the prior 420 cooler and we'll need to do a tear down to fully explore where all these improvements come from that'll be separate video the original day one liquid freezer 2280 ran at almost equal noise levels making it a clean like for- like comparison that one was 50.9 de over ambient without the offset Mount we're back in the lab again testing fpm again we're using a Hotwire anomet to look at the linear feet per minute flow known as fpm or LPM if you prefer of the vrm fan so previously four years ago we verified that liquid freezer 2 was in fact not a gimmick it actually did something the way to test the vrm fan is too fold really there's uh thermals which is the obvious and there's just air flow cuz if the air is flowing over it it's doing something uh so for this testing we position a hot wire anemometer in fixed and carefully noted location so that we get the exact same positioning each time between the liquid freezer 2 and the liquid freezer 3 this data is not comparable to the data we collected in 2020 we've slightly repositioned things but everything going on the charts today and in the image it's directly comparable here's a quick and simplified overview map of the motherboard with the pump block overlaid on top of it this shows only the flow of each measurement point with the vrm fan on and the radiator fans off and it compares the liquid freezer 2 and 3 360 options directly the liquid freezer 3 is always the top entry for the text with a two as the bottom this is with each fan at its full speed and the results are directly comparable using our new hot wire anemometer testing updated from the last time as for fan RPM the new fan Max is out at 2500 rpm broad observations are that the liquid a 3 vrm Fan seems to mostly direct its air toward the top right and the mid left the 488 fpm and 425 fpm results are very high and indicate significantly higher flow in these areas than elsewhere where the vrm Fan's air flow stays at around 110 to 165 fpm the original vrm fan more evenly split its air flow between the top right the upper left and the bottom left regions but at significantly lower flow rates than the new fan when both are at 100% speed it also had a weak spot in the top left as a result of the old mounting hardware blocking air flow to this region from the vrm fan and the liquid freezer 3 resolves this overall the liquid freezer 3's air flow is hitting the correct areas the center left is probably the most important that's where a lot of heat builds up because you often have your 10 gbit Nick over there too so there's a lot of shared PCB area in that region that heats up and then some extra flow up in the top right helps with any vrm components that are up north of the board especially where the heat sink typically is located one final observation is that the bottom left inductor gets less flow with the new liquid freezer 3 vrm Fan than the older one however uh not shown here but the liquid freezer 3's fan can reach a little bit below that whereas the two gets cut off by the chassis this simple chart shows the reduction in temperature so a bigger bar is better and means a larger impact zero would be the performance with the vrm fan off with VM fans at their maximum speeds the new liquid freezer 3 post significantly higher total cooling header for vrm components it manages a 7° reduction on Moss zero which is huge and two 6.3 reductions for the other fats this is a clear Improvement for Arctic and the new fan is definitely working we'll quickly do some testing in our Hemi anaco chamber we have a whole separate build video on this in the channel if you're curious about its construction what it costs all that stuff we'll link it below but this testing is again focused on the pump and the VM fan that's cuz those two components changed more significantly so for this testing we're positioning the the mic relatively close to the pump cap for the cooler and that's because we want to really capture the noises of it for comparison purposes we're also toggling off any of the radiator fans during this testing so it's strictly going to look at the liquid freezer 2 pump and vrm fan versus the liquid freezer 3 pump and vrm fan here's the chart in this Benchmark you can see that when both fans and pumps are at maximum speed so we're not normalizing for the vrm fan speed we're just letting them run flat out the new pump and fan combo at 100% definitely runs louder in fact the perceived increase to the human ear is nearing two times louder as for frequency spectrum the new pump and fan have a spike around the 5,000 HZ range we'll listen for this in a moment and compared to the predecessor there's a louder bump in the 1800 HZ range to help illustrate what these noises sound like we're going to play back two samples but this is important so first of all the testing is done in this environment with a high quality microphone 10 inches away from the product under test that's not how you're going to use it the noises will sound louder to you in your headphones where I'm going to have to boost the audio as well so it comes through at the same level as my voice here so for demonstration purposes what we're trying to show you is the two types of noise but the volume of them as we're going to play it through your speakers or headphones that will be about equal for the actual noise level difference you can see that the frequency spectrum plot so listen for the type of noise and remember that if all the fans in your system like GPU fans are active you probably won't hear the noises that these make however if it's relatively passive and on desktop you probably will hear the noise that it makes that's how you should draw the distinction otherwise just try to identify which one annoys you more here's the liquid freezer too and these precise Clips are not what we sampled for the plot and here's the liquid freezer 3 the three has more pump noise coming through which contributes a lot to the noise difference overall one thing we can't account for in a short test period as in the scale of weeks we're on is how the pump noise settles acoustically though at 100% speeds for the pump and the fan the new one is definitely louder in a demonstrable way versus the original our pressure scans will start with the new Intel LGA 1700 contact frame since it's the most unique aspect of this cooler we conducted four passes for the 360 but we're only going to show two cuz they're all the same uh first on the left we have the Intel stock ilm when using the liquid freezer 2420 the same one we used to debut our contact frame analysis almost 2 years ago now and we can't use the liquid freezer 3 here because once again it doesn't have an is mounting option it's only the frame they include the Intel stock ilm was sorely lacking in pressure on the bottom edge of the CPU with the right Edge pointed toward the vrm Intel is weak here overall and has its pressure in the wrong places next the thermal Grizzly frame that sort of validated and created this Market Smooths over the contact across the entirety of the IHS there's some gaps towards the io board side at the top but the distribution is significantly better than the ilm from Intel and is more Central which is where the die is the cheaper thermal right frame is next with the first pass Distributing more pressure across the entire IHS but with some weaker areas a remount improved pressure and produced actually the best scan yet but as we discussed in our review of the thermal right frame its downside is the sometimes less precise installation process that can result in variable outcomes and here's the liquid freezer 3 it's defin ly not as good as the thermal right or thermal Grizzly frames but it is improved over the stock ilm some of that could be contributed by the cold plate too but we can't isolate that variable because there's only one option for mounting which is the included Arctic frame Arctic is lacking pressure on the lawn sides of the CPU and likely due to the cold plate Behavior also has a weak spot of pressure about 8 mm in from the CPU side nearest the vrm and that's oriented right on this image you can see that almost Channel form between between the right edge of the CPU in this shot and the rest of it this consistently appeared including in an entirely different unit with the 280 that leads us to believe that it's a design issue and not a one-off contact is good centrally and it is better than the stock ilm but there's a lot of room for improvement here we're overall disappointed with the outcome of the pressure because if they're designing the whole cooler around this Frame they have the opportunity to make this better than anyone else's and it just isn't but we'll talk more about that disappointment in the conclusion so make sure to listen to that section to try and understand why this pattern was emerging we took the cold plate to our new $60,000 uh laser scanner that produces 3D images of devices we scan we bought this last year and this is certainly more advanced than our old physical needle probing method this machine has a repeatability of less than one micron and we recently used this in our Billet block review of the monoblock you can check that out on the channel for more background the equipment allows us to not only identif identify a problem which we could already do but to try and pinpoint the cause to better understand it to help fund our efforts and Equipment purchases like this as we're still getting the money back on this one please go to store. Gamers access.net and grab a gn15 metal emblem glass featuring a highquality badge we launch that for the 15th anniversary or you can grab a rugged large modmat for your next PC build or one of our memory explosion diagram t-shirts and thanks for your support here's the scan after adjusting the scan lines and the levelness of the cold pl we eventually ended up with this result without magnifying it everything looks relatively flat we have a maximum Point too Delta of 60 microns but an overall good consistency one point to its adjacent neighbor we were hoping this would reveal that channel that we identified in the LGA 1700 mounting pressure map but because we can't conduct the scan while the Cal plate is mounted to an IHS we can only see the unsprung version when magnified 100 times you can see the channel very slightly in the cold plate at the weak pressure spots we saw previously this is present on both of the units that we tested for pressure the channel is likely amplifying under the spring load of the mount and we now know that the plate is at least partially responsible for the shortcoming not just the mounting hardware and it likely deres from how it's mounted to the pump block we'll investigate that in our separate tear down video coming up now we're going to move on to the LGA 1700 thermals this testing uses a couple of different mounting frames for the liquid freezer 2 which was comp comptible with thermal Grizzly and thermal right and all the others we also test the Mystique with the stock Intel ilm that's the Deep cool solution and then for the liquid freezer 3 it only has one option and that's the Arctic contact frame so we're testing it with that all the testing is done at 100% fan speeds and the noise levels listed the data is not comparable to our previous contact frame testing because we've changed our approach we've changed the power consumption changed some of the voltages that's just because it's been like a year and a half now so let's get into it here's the chart the stock ilms performed the worst for the Arctic test both down at around 63° C over ambient the Mystique also used the Intel stock ilm however at 49 DBA it's able to Brute Force past the limitations and land at the top of the chart anyway the liquid freezer 3 360 with the included Arctic frame had it between two liquid freezer 2420 entries one with the thermal right frame and one with the thermal Grizzly frame these two are within error of each other but are 5 de better than the ilm unfortunately we can't determine how much of the liquid freezer 3's Improvement is from the frame versus the pump and the coal plate changes because again the frame can't be isolated what we can say is that the liquid freezer 3 remains impressively noise efficient at just 40 DBA it's equaling a 45 DBA entry from a significantly larger 420 radiator likewise it's encroaching on the louder Mystique 360 even still deep cool holds a slight Advantage here for thermals against the original 360 with the inm the Improvement is about 5° a noteworthy generational game okay we're going to take a look at the Intel installation first here but before we do that I do want to look at the contact frames and and just point out a few key differences between arctic's frame and uh the other frames on the market so arctic's frame is a lot more like the thermalite frame in the sense that it actually makes contact with the motherboard so if we take a look here the back of the Arctic frame has these two foam pads that will actually be in contact with the motherboard so it makes installation very easy just like the thermalite contact frame and that is in contrast to the thermal Grizzly frame if you want to learn more about those two frames you can look at their respective reviews on our channel so we are going to follow arctic's directives kind of uh step by step just to show you what it would be like for you at home doing this if you don't have a test bench so the first thing they say to do is to place a piece of foam under the motherboard so I I've got a nice piece of anti-static foam I would recommend using something anti-static as well and then we're going to which I've already done we we will place the CPU in the socket and then we're going to remove the stock ilm so the reason they have you put the motherboard down on a piece of foam to support it is the back plate on the other side of this ilm if you did not support it as soon as you took all four of these screws out it would fall off and it makes installing the contact frame uh much more difficult and requiring extra hands and now we're going to place our Arctic contact frame down and they have this contact frame with the marked with the little triangle just like the CPU and of course you want to line those two things up and I'm just going to drop my four screws in so they didn't have any guidance on how heavily to torque these screws um so I would recommend men just going snug just enough to engage that those foam pads on the back of the contact frame so I'm going to rotate this because the tubing on this cooler is actually really stiff and I'll get one side started here all right we got both sides started and now I'm just going to alternate a few turns on each side until I reach a point where they stop and then your final step is just to put on the vrm fan and that goes on uh via magnets so that's very easy to install and you're done so let's take a look at the AMD solution Okay so we've got our AMD board our am5 board here we're going to go ahead and remove our stock brackets that come with the motherboard we going to just place our standoffs there they are just Hollow pieces of plastic there's nothing fancy about them the brackets are are asymmetrical um one is labeled left one is labeled right um left and right respectively is how the motherboard would sit in your compter in a traditional computer so the left is going to go here closer to the vrms away from the RAM and then our right bracket is going closest to the ram here snug those up the reason these are asymmetrical is because Arctic is now forcing the offset uh installation on all AMD users when we reviewed the liquid freezer 2420 um it had two brackets you could do an offset bracket or a traditional bracket that covered the entire IHS the offset bracket in our testing showed uh a temperature reduction so uh I guess Arctic has gone with this the thought that why even bother shipping it with anything else so um that's why these brackets are asymmetrical um I'm going to go ahead and start one side here by hand and then we'll use the screwdriver shove down the other end here so this kind of illustrates and transitions nicely to the one of the criticisms I had of this cooler and it's this leaf spring as cool as it is man it has it makes mounting this on amd's platform very difficult the on the intel on their their contact frame it's actually quite easy and you don't have to compress the spring at all but to get these threaded you have to compress press that spring a little and it's it's kind of tedious to get it threaded so once those are threaded son of dude is this serious right now okay okay now that they're actually threaded we can go ahead and tighten these down until they are snug and stop turning so if we take a look here at the CPU the IHS is almost entirely covered except for these three little legs so you're losing a little bit of surface area but um it's for a good cause the offset will reduce temperatures by moving the cooler part of the cold plate closer to the ccds which is where most of the heat is generated and finally of course you're going to throw on the vrm fan um critiques the AMD installation is a little tedious it can be a little difficult having to compress that leaf spring while you're trying to get the hardware threaded uh is not my favorite feature on a cooler I've spoke about this before uh I like to get things threaded while they're not under tension um Additionally the tubes are very stiff which can make the installation on AMD even more difficult as compared to their Intel installation which was relatively easy and straightforward um and hasslefree so that wraps up the installation segment and now I'm going to throw it back to Steve the conclusion is pretty straightforward so we think that the value and the performance is good overall Arctic however has some key areas where it can improve as it iterates on this product that's sort of how they approach the liquid freezer 2 line where there were small iterative update along the way and hopefully they do that here as well so the base concepts are all working together it's just that the individual Concepts don't always stand out particularly strong on their own and the biggest example of that is the contact frame the price is what impacts value so this has slightly increased for MSRP again we expect competitive sales on these the value remains strongly competitive though in a market flooded with LCD and blaz and coolers that sell closer to $200 these days than where these are so Arctic hasn't forsaken its audience of people who are probably more function first and want the cooling for a good value and that's where the black model comes in at 120 to 130 bucks for the liquid freezer three coolers we think that's good positioning in terms of cooling efficiency at a given noise level our noise normalized testing shows that the liquid freezer 3 is currently the best we've ever tested when at 100% fan speed the liquid freezer 3 360 was performing the same as coolers that were 10 DBA louder which is a massive change in noise level that's where that phrasing efficiency comes from when we're talking about coolers we do have some disappointments though unfortunately the Intel frame just isn't as good as it could be it's better than the the stock ilm but right now with how this is performing in terms of pressure you would basically be better off if Arctic had shipped this with something compatible with the normal ilm bought a thermal right or thermal Grizzly frame but thermal right frame for seven bucks say and then just mounted the liquid freezer 3 to that unfortunately in some ways anyway this is a required part uh so you don't get to do that but and we don't get to thermally test it in a reasonable way against this one because you have to use Arctic with the way they designed it if it were the best we'd ever seen that'd be a different story but we think Arctic has the capability to improve on this they control the coal plate and they control the frame unlike separate frame only solutions it's at least less overall Hardware than the am4 and am5 mounts previously the am51 in particular now the vrm fan is more effective but we found that the combined pump and vrm fan at Max Speed were louder than the predecessor one more side of this that's positive so we review the product not the company but we do consider the company's history because it matters for things like support RMA things like that Arctic is starting to develop a strong Foundation here with the liquid freezer 2 line they had two events specifically that come to mind uh one of them is the offset mounting for AMD that wasn't really discovered until later in the the life cycle a little after the launch of the product it was starting to get some wider discussion online and they eventually made an offset Mount they shipped it and they included it with the later liquid freezer 2o so showing willingness to iteratively improve on it and not just go nope that's the product it's staying that way till the next one that's a good thing the second was an issue we covered in a different video where there were batches of liquid freezer twos that uh could have potential Gunk buildup basically and so what Arctic did was it got in front of the issue it actually notified us before we found it on our own that's always a good thing uh and they started shipping out replacement kits so users could either self-repair them or they could send them in for repair if they felt uncomfortable doing it loved the idea of the self repair kit because it's not hard to do it saves massive amounts of time for the end user not waiting for an RMA H it's also just a lot less waste and shipping so they are starting to prove that they'll support it which is important we need to see that continue of course in the very least it's good value it is the most effective for noise normalized cooling performance that we've looked at uh and they have a couple key areas to work on so uh overall I would say that we can recommend the liquid freezer 3 okay that's it for this one thanks for watching as always subscribe for more to support this content please go to store. Gamers access.net grab a PC Building modmat A solder mat one of our t-shirts coaster packs or any of the other items on the store like our 3D emblem glasswar and that directly helps fund our purchasing of cool equipment like we use in this more pressure contact paper and uh it funds all the testing we do thanks for watching we'll see you all next time\n"