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

How Much Does it Cost?

The ARCTIC Liquid Freezer III 360 is available now with an MSRP of just £100.49 but at the time of writing was on sale for just £86.99, while the smaller ARCTIC Liquid Freezer III 240 has an MSRP of £87.99 and again at the time of writing was on sale for just £69.99. This means they’re not only some of the best coolers on the market right now, either at higher RPM or when their operated at lower RPM, but they’re also some of the cheapest coolers in their respective class.

Overview

When I reviewed the Arctic Liquid Freezer III 360, I was blown away by the level of quality and features it had to offer. Arctic has a great reputation already, well known for great quality fans, and the Freezer series of AIO coolers has proven popular for many years now, which is why it’s still going strong on its third iteration.

There’s some features that aren’t particularly exclusive to Arctic, but that certainly put it firmly into the premium end of the AIO market. There’s integrated cable management, meaning there are no cables running visually from the pump housing, giving them an ultra-clean design. The cables run through the tubing to the radiator, allowing you to hide the connectors.

There’s a built-in VRM cooling fan on the CPU block too, which blows air down towards your motherboard, ensuring vital power delivery components are given additional cooling performance, which can improve system stability, especially in scenarios where you’re running high-end CPUs for long periods of time or pushing higher boost/overclocks. You also get Arctic MX-6 thermal paste included, and the fans on the radiators come pre-installed, massively speeding up the overall installation time for the coolers, and making them very user friendly.

Running the Arctic AIO coolers at their stock settings was impressive. The temperatures were great, but again, while the acoustics weren’t bad, they were reasonably average to the point you could hear them, but I wouldn’t go so far to say they sounded loud.

However, dropping the fan RPM on these coolers gave us some pretty drastic results. Not only was I able to easily match the acoustic performance of our best air coolers, but these coolers still managed to beat the performance of more expensive air coolers while our CPU was under heavy load. Admittedly, the coolers are super quiet like this, but being AIO, you can occasionally hear some liquid flowing noises or bubbling sounds, which you would not get from an air cooler, but overall, they’re still extremely quiet.

Overview

What do you think, would you rather have a quality air cooler, or would you be tempted to buy a more powerful AIO cooler and turn those fans down to reap the acoustic benefits? I don’t think there’s any wrong answer either way, but with the price and performance seen from the Arctic Freezer III’s, they are certainly hard to ignore.