Arctic Liquid Freezer III 360 A-RGB review

With an enviable reputation for making some of the best value AIO liquid coolers on the market, Arctic has avoided making hardware too outlandishly feature-rich in an effort to offer great cooling without needing a bank loan. Now on its third generation of Liquid Freezer models, the likes of the Liquid Freezer III 360 A-RGB trump a lot of the competition in terms of value. This is thanks to unique features that boost their CPU cooling prowess while also keeping other parts of your PC cool for a lot less than many similarly sized options.

They’re available in a range of sizes in both 120 mm and 140 mm fan configurations, with the model I'm reviewing being the Liquid Freezer III 360 A-RGB. If you have more modest requirements then 240 mm and 280 mm models are also available, alongside a monstrous 420 mm model with three 140 mm fans.

This review concerns the illuminated white model with RGB lighting spanning both pump and fans, but if you want to save some cash there are standard black versions too with RGB lighting that cost even less. The equivalent of the 360 mm model I'm looking at here, for example, can be had for just £77 here in the UK—that’s good for a 360 mm AIO liquid cooler in anyone’s books.

Part of what impresses here is the extra thick radiator. At 38 mm, its depth is a good 10 mm or so above what you’d see on most other coolers and the added surface area inside means more heat can be dissipated with the same airflow. In theory it’s able to deal with more heat before its fans need to spin up too, but the added thickness can also mean more restriction.

Thankfully the fins inside the radiator spaced a little wider apart to reduce that restriction, but it can still potentially be a limiting factor, especially at lower fan speeds. The other issue with a thicker radiator is case compatibility, but most cases that can fit a standard liquid cooler can also house a Liquid Freezer III as we’re only talking another 8-10 mm.

If in doubt, your case’s manual or product page often has this information, though five minutes with a ruler will also suffice. Still, the thickness requires some fairly beefy fans and the P12 PWM PST A-RGB fans included top out at 2,000 rpm, though there are AIO liquid coolers with fans way north of this. So, I'm hoping Arctic has done its research, finding a balance between fan speed and optimising the airflow as well as the thicker radiator.

The other eyebrow-raising feature is the removable fan that sits on top of the pump section. This drives air down onto your motherboard and helps to cool components such as the VRMs and SSD heatsinks that otherwise can get very toasty due to an AIO liquid cooler’s lack of local airflow compared to an air cooler. There are two cables included in the box that you’ll need to choose from and attach to the pump to allow for different modes of control.

One combines the pump, radiator fans and VRM fan into a single 4-pin connector, ramping all up or down depending on CPU temperature. The other cable separates those outputs giving you individual control. If you’re worried about the pump or VRM fan making noise (after all, the latter does max out at 2,500 rpm), thankfully you can control them separately using your motherboard’s additional fan headers.

In fact, many motherboards allow you to swap from the CPU to the VRMs as the input for fan control on specific fan headers, so you could ramp the fan up only when the VRMs get toasty, which is a fabulous option. The down side is that the pump section is quite large and occasionally has issues with motherboard compatibility, especially with Mini-ITX models, so make sure you check Arctic’s list on the product page.

All these separate cables sounds like a nightmare, but Arctic has at least combined the three fans’ 4-pin and RGB cables into a single line and also run those through the coolant tube’s sleaving. Using a few cable ties—which you'll have to source yourself as Arctic doesn't include these—you could easily combine the separate cables into one strand for neatness. The RGB lighting itself covers the pump and fans from one cable. It’s vibrant and contrasts well with the white components, although it's maybe not as bright as more expensive coolers.

Arctic further impressed us with the inclusion of a contact frame for LGA1700 and LGA1851 CPUs to reduce the pressure on the CPU that can otherwise cause it to bend or affect the contact with the pump section. This sounds great in practice, but was a little fiddly to install. Adjusting the pump’s contact plate to sit directly over the hottest part of the CPU, which on modern AMD CPUs is not quite in the middle, also offsets the AMD mount slightly.

Installation was otherwise pretty straightforward, but attaching the correct PWM cable for your needs before mounting the pump to the motherboard definitely requires a bit of work, as doing so later is tricky. There seems to be plenty of length to the tubing too and, with the cables on the fans pre-tidied, the installation didn’t take long at all.

With everything at full speed, I recorded a reading of 49 dBA on my sound meter, but without any horrible whines or droning. The removable VRM fan proved its worth too, dropping the peak VRM temperature by 5°C with no discernible increase in noise either. The pump was a tad loud at full speed, but the VRM fan housing encloses it, hiding most of the noise within, plus the pump only reaches full speed when the fans run flat out with the single PWM cable.

Tuning the fan down to 40% speed saw it operate almost silently, and I only saw a 2°C rise in the peak load temperature with my Core i7 14700K. In my Metro Exodus game test, the CPU reached 69°C, but rose to 83°C and 84°C respectively in 3DMark’s Steel Nomad stress test, and x264 encoding test. Cinebench was a little cooler at 80°C, while it took the cooler just under three minutes to drop back to idle temperatures from load.

If you’re looking for an affordable AIO liquid cooler that’s both capable of handling the hottest CPUs out there, but also operates at very quiet levels under lower loads, then the Arctic Liquid Freezer III 360 A-RGB is well made, easy to install (for the most part), and even includes RGB lighting. The VRM cooling fan is an added benefit, and the option to control it, the pump and radiator fans separately for fine tuned airflow is a welcome addition that caters to both die-hard tinkerers as well as those that just want to build their PC and start racking up headshots.