Arctic Liquid Freezer III PRO ARGB CPU Liquid Cooler Review

Thermal Testing

The Arctic Liquid Freezer III PRO’s offset mounts aren’t ideal for our heatsink test setup

When testing Arctic’s Freezer III Pro, we wanted to look at the impact of the cooler’s new “offset” mounting option, only to find that it wasn’t an option. Yes, Arctic’s new “offset” mounting options are their default mounting options. That means AMD AM5 and Intel LGA1700/1851 users can only use the “offset” option on their coolers, as no “standard” mounts are available.

While this isn’t a problem for those using the CPUs that these coolers are optimised for, it is a problem for users of alternative CPUs. The AMD offset mounts are optimised for AMD’s chiplet-based Ryzen 7000/9000 series CPUs. Arctic’s Intel offset mounts are optimised for Intel’s Core Ultra 200 (Arrow Lake) series CPUs. That’s a problem for us, because our test bed uses Intel’s i5-14600K (Raptor Lake CPU. This means that Arctic’s offset mount is not ideal for our processor.

(Arctic Liquid Freezer III bracket (left) and Arctic Liquid Freezer III PRO bracket (Right))

To test the impact of Arctic’s offset mount, we took the mounts from Arctic’s non-PRO Arctic Freezer III coolers to see the baseline performance of a CPU cooler that isn’t “offset.” In short, our results below should show you why Arctic should have shipped this cooler with both standard and offset cooler mounting plates. If this cooler had both mounts, it would be a much better cooler for Intel Raptor Lake users.

1,000 RPM Testing

When using Arctic’s offset mounts, we saw that the performance of their new PRO series cooler is almost identical to its predecessor. When using a “standard” mount without an offset with our Raptor Lake CPU, CPU delta temperatures dropped by almost 5.5 degrees. Clearly, the wrong offset can have a huge impact on a CPU cooler’s performance.

1,500 RPM Testing

With 1500 RPM fan speeds, we see similar results. CPU thermals drop by 4 degrees if we use a “standard” CPU mounting plate. Sadly, this mounting plate is not available as a standard part of this CPU cooler. With this cooler’s stock/offset mounts, Arctic’s new PRO series CPU cooler is almost identical to its non-PRO counterpart.

Note that Arctic’s offset mounts are optimised for Intel’s Core Ultra 200 series CPUs.

Maximum RPM Testing

Thanks to the fact that this cooler’s fans can be cranked up to 3,000 RPM, the Liquid Freezer III PRO can best the best CPU liquid coolers on the market when using the right CPU mount. Sadly, this cooler’s stock mounts are offset, and are only optimised for Core Ultra 200 series CPUs. This means that users of LGA1700 CPUs will have sub-optimal results.

This could have been one of the best CPU coolers available for Intel Raptor Lake CPUs, but Arctic didn’t ship this cooler with an optimised (non-offset) mounting plate.