Arctic Liquid Freezer III 360 and 420 Review
Cinebench R24 Thermals
OC3D CPU Cooler Stress Test
We want to push CPU coolers to their limit, and that requires a workload that will place maximum load on our i5-14600K CPU. Why didn’t we choose an i7 or an i9? The simple answer is that we want to test a variety of CPU Cooler options. If we put the hottest CPU we could in our system, only the best of the best CPU coolers would even past our testing procedures. Since not everyone uses such a power-hungry CPU, we decided to tone the wattage and thermal loads down by using an i5-14600K. Even so, this CPU consumes a lot of power and generates a lot of heat under all-core workloads.
For testing, we have used Cinebench R24. This is an all-core workload that places heavy strain on all available CPU cores. This load pushes CPU thermals higher than any other, and do so consistently. We use Cinebench R24 for 30 minutes to see how hot our CPU gets over that time. If CPU temperatures rise to 100 degrees celcius or over, that CPU cooler has failed our testing. This is part of the reason why there are more coolers on our higher fan RPM cooler charts. Some coolers will pass our thermal testing at higher RPMs, but fail at lower fan RPMs.
Liquid Freezer III series 1000 RPM performance
Below, we can see that the Arctic Liquid Freezer III series performs well in our heatsink performance charts. Both the 360mm and 420mm models best Corsair’s H150i Elite and HYTE’s THICC Q60, though not by a huge margin.
Note that the performance of Arctic’s 360mm and 420mm model are almost identical, with the larger 420mm model having no cooling advantage over its smaller counterpart, at least with 1,000 RPM fans.
Liquid Freezer III series 1500 RPM performance
Cranking up this AIO’s fans to 1500 RPM sees the HYTE THICC Q60 and Corsair H150i ELITE XT push ahead, but only by a small margin. Since this cooler is the only one that uses a CPU Contact Frame, I expected to see better from the Liquid Freezer III series. That said, these aren’t bad results.
Liquid Freezer III series Max RPM performance
Pushing the AIO fans of the Freezer III series to their limits, we see a small drop in CPU thermals and see both coolers maintain their position in our performance charts. Note that these two coolers use lower-RPM fans than the coolers that outperformed them. That makes these CPU coolers quieter at maximum fan RPMs. The better performing coolers traded noise levels for enhanced cooling performance.
