Can the Arctic Freezer III AIOs Run Cooler and Quieter Than the Best Air Coolers?

Performance

The one thing that stands out to me, however, is that Arctics acoustic performance was ok, pretty much in the middle of our charts, which is fairly common for AIO coolers vs air coolers, and it got me to thinking, we haven’t been doing tests on lower fan settings for our coolers, and how low can we go? My own PC CPU cooler (and frankly, everything else in there) is virtually silent, but I’ve invested in some pretty expensive cooling hardware to do this. Can we do very quiet for under £100 and still get flagship or at least, very high-end cooling performance?

Arctic have great cooling performance using similar fan speeds to the competition, but how much does lowing those RPM impact things? That’s certainly worth finding out. It’s worth pointing out that most traditional air coolers will be virtually silent at idle loads, AIO coolers tend to be fairly consistent in their acoustic output once configured to a fixed RPM, but you can setup a fan curve too, if you wanted. However, it’s always my aim to make my AIO cooler consistently quiet and have a predictable sound profile by using a consistent fan speed throughout. Find the lowest RPM you can where you get good temperatures and are happy with the acoustics and leave it there, nothing bugs me more about a cooler than fans revving up and down while I’m working.

The Noctua NH-U12A is a fantastic single tower cooler, and that scored around 44 dBa at load, matching the acoustics of the Arctic FREEZER III 360 AIO exactly at high CPU load, such as while gaming. Of course, the Arctic FREEZER III 360 AIO crushes the Noctua with temperatures that are around 10c lower given that it’s a much bigger cooler, but that was to be expected. The Arctic FREEZER III 240 AIO runs a little warmer, given it has a smaller radiator (240mm vs 360mm), but the acoustic levels are lower still, just a bit above that of the Noctua D15S.

To get acoustic levels down on the bigger cooler to something like the be quiet! Dark Rock Pro Elite or the Noctua NH-D15S, which are two of the quietest air coolers we’ve ever tested, which whispered away at 37 and 38.8 dBa respectively. To do this, we need to drop the fan RPM pretty significantly on the Arctic FREEZER III 360 AIO, with its default setting being around 1700-1800 RPM, and I had to recue them to around 1300-1400 RPM to get the noise levels down to 37 dBa. The same was true of the 240mm, which needed to be dropped from around 1800 to 1200-1300 but less so on the Arctic FREEZER III 240 AIO as we’re only trying to hush two fans here and it was only 1dBa off the Noctua D15S to begin with.

What was surprising is how effective this was. Both of the coolers normalised their acoustics at 37 dBa, matching the lowest acoustics of our air coolers, which was the DeepCool Assassin IV at 37 dBa. This resulted in the Freezer III coolers running just 3c warmer, much less of an increase than I expected.