Arctic Liquid Freezer 240 Review

Review of the Arctic Liquid Freezer 240 CPU Liquid Cooling Unit

For years you’ve been using CPU Fans and heatsinks for years, but I know you have been gawking at some of the CPU liquid cooling units for years, well I know I have.  As those years have passed many CPU liquid cooling unit designs have come and gone, most of those custom units that you would have to build for yourself, not an easy task for many.  As they have grown in popularity, companies have been releasing All in One’s (AIO, Prebuilt sealed liquid cooling units), some great and some absolutely horrible.

Today I will be reviewing Arctic’s Liquid Freezer 240 CPU Liquid Cooling unit.  Arctic has been around for years, maybe more known for their thermal paste like Arctic Silver 5, MX-2 and MX-4. With that, they also released the popular Arctic Freezer 7 Air CPU Cooler so it seems a little uncharacteristic for them to jump into the Liquid cooling scene. So let’s see if they really do a good job in this arena.

Let’s start with the specs and features.

Specifications and Features

• 350 Watt Maximum Cooling Performance
  • Though recommended for processors with TDP’s up to 300 Watts
• 2.0 Watt Pump Power Consumption
• Micro Skived Fin Copper Cold Plate
  • 82mm Width
  • 40mm Depth
• Aluminum Radiator
  • 38mm Depth
  • 120mm Width
  • 272mm Length
• 326mm Tube Length
• Includes 4 x 120mm Arctic F12 PWN PST fans
  • Oil encapsulated fluid Dynamic Bearings for extra-long service life
  • 6 Year Warranty on Fans
• PWM Sharing Technology to lower fan noise
• Includes 8g MX-4 thermal compound
• Ultra-lite 3.59 pounds net weight
• 2 Year Warranty of Liquid Cooling Unit
• Socket compatibility
  • Intel Socket: 1150, 1151, 1155, 1156, 2011, 2011-3
  • AMD Socket: AM2, AM2+, AM3, AM3+, FM1, FM2, FM2+

Thankfully, it looks like you can get this for almost any type of system out there, almost.  So let’s get to the unboxing and see what this puppy looks like.

Lots of stuff in there, and the unit looks pretty solid.

Here is the little unassuming pump, branded Arctic, though I will let you know my problem with the branding later in the review.

Flipping this pump around we find this, a smooth and shiny copper micro skived fin cold plate to make sure your CPU is nice and cool.

Following the 326mm tubing we find the aluminum built radiator.

Looking at the end of the radiator, we find a label and I was surprised to see that this radiator was built by Asetek, very interesting but not a bad idea considering Asetek has built and rebranded cooling units for many of the brands you know and love today.

One thing to mention, that might not mean a lot to some people, but it is RoHS compliant.  For those of you that might not know, RoHS means (Restriction of Use of Hazardous Substances), so no lead, cadmium, polybrominated diphenyl ether and a few others and that means it can be sold in the countries in the EU and of course better for the environment.  Just some edumication for you.

Then they include a bunch of nuts and bolts, I will list them here.

16 x screws, these are to run through the screw holes on the fans on each corner, connecting to the radiator.

4 x flat washers, used when mounting the fans to the case as to not have the screws scratch your case, good thinking Arctic, protecting your investments in more than 1 way.

Backplate for Intel socket 115x series processors.

4 x standoff’s for Intel socket 115x series processors.

4 x standoff’s for Intel socket 2011 series processors.

4 x standoff’s for AMD series processors.

4 x thumb nut screws

1 x Intel retention ring

1 x AMD retention ring

They include a 0.8gram container of MX-4.  My gripe about that is they make the thermal compound, they could of at least included a tube of it, in case you install it wrong or something, you can always wipe and reapply.  When I was done installing it, I had half of an application so make sure you install it right the first time or just buy an extra tube if you buy this unit.  Not to mention, after you apply it, the bag is open, there is no way to reseal it unless you pinch it shut, a tube can be resealed easily.  Of course, they do this because they want you to buy some thermal paste, but still, come on.  Just in case you want to buy a tube, check out this link: https://geni.us/6NAIJBN?eN8g3y

Ok, back to the review.  Inside of the package you will also find 4 x 120mm Arctic F12 PWN PST fans.  These fans are awesome for a few reasons.  They offer first off a 6 year warranty because of the oil encapsulated fluid dynamic bearings keeping the steel shaft nice and lubricated, giggle.  Then they are amazingly quiet at only 0.3 sone, though of course as you push the processor they can get louder, but that’s understood.  They spin up anywhere between 500 and 1350RPM’s providing up to 74 CFM per fan, but there is something a little more cool about these (no pun intended).

If you look at the cables attached to each fan, they have a fan header of course and are sleeved (the cables), but one is male and one is female.  What that means is, instead of finding 4 separate fan header connections on the board, or 2 x Molex to 2 fan header splitters, you can actually piggy back these things too each other which means these 4 fans will only take up 1 fan header connection and 1 for the pump.  Though this will of course lower the RPM’s to what is mentioned above, they gave this a name, they call it PWM Sharing Technology, makes sense.

While this is marketing at its finest, why did it take so long for someone to come out with this, this is awesome.  Great job Arctic.

[nextpage title=”Testing and Installing”]Ok, so now you know about all of the pieces that come inside the box, and have seen the unboxing, I do recommend testing the unit before you install it into your machine.  Mind you, it is rare to have a bad liquid cooling unit right out of the box, it does happen.  Let me show you how to test it first.

OK, well it looks like everything checks out, now let’s install it.  Just in case you don’t know how to, check this video out.

Here is the radiator up in the front

And here is the radiator

It bugs me a bit that it is upside down, but that’s the way they recommend installing the pump.

Here she is at night, looking all sexy.

OK, so now that I have installed it and shown off, let’s do some thermal testing.

[nextpage title=”Thermal Performance and Testing”]

My tests will include providing thermals for an idle unit, then running Cinebench and then running AIDA64 for 15 to get this a little toasty, to see what it can handle.  Check it out.

First off, here are my system specs

• Processor: Intel Core i7 4790K
• CPU Cooling: Arctic Liquid Freezer 240 Liquid Cooling
• Motherboard: Asus Sabertooth Z87
• Memory: Patriot Viper 3 Series DDR3 16GB 1600MHz
• Power Supply: Cooler Master Silent Pro Gold 1200W
• Video Card: Sapphire Radeon NITRO R9 390 8GB GDDR5
• Hard Drive (PCI-E SSD): Plextor M6e Black Edition 128GB
• Hard Drive (SSD): Samsung 850 EVO 500GB
• Hard Drive (SSD): Patriot Ignite480GB
• Hard Drive (Mechanical): Hitachi 1TB 7200RPM
• OS: Windows 10 Professional
• Case: Fractal Design Define S Windowed

After 15 minutes of sitting idle in windows, here is how the temps are looking.

Using CPUID’s Hardware Monitor, we can see the lowest temp the Arctic Freezer 240 hit was 27°C, that’s pretty good, the current temperature was 29°C and the highest temp it hit was 48°C, that’s after windows loaded and started loading the apps.  As soon as my system got into Windows, I started HWMonitor and just let it sit there for 15 minutes.

Now don’t freak out seeing my Core speed at 799.81Mhz, this was set in Power Options.

If you want this set, go into the Power options in the Control Panel, click “Change plan settings” then again click “Change advanced power settings” and scroll down to “Processor power management”. Click to expand “Processor Power Management” and click to expand “Minimum Processor state” and you can set the percentage to whatever you would like, I set mine to 5%. When complete, click Apply and OK and you are good to go.

Don’t worry, this will not affect performance at all, the speed ramps up in a fraction of a second.

Also, the temps will be dependent on programs running in the background, in my tests I had (aside from what starts up with Windows 10 by default) PlexTurbo, Radeon Settings, Samsung Magician, Logitec Gaming Software 8.78.129 and AVG Anti-Virus, this is a real system after all, not just a benchsystem.

OK, to start with the first benchmark, we will use Cinebench R15.  Cinebench evaluates the CPU’s performance capabilities using the processors processing power to render a photorealistic 3D scene.  As the program runs, you can see each core (physical and hyper-threaded) load individual frames.  The CPU portion of the test only performs the tests using the CPU.

Ok, so for stock speeds I got a 845cb score.

The temperature when the test was done was at 56°C and the max this processor hit was 59°C.  A 15.38% difference from idle temps, but it is to be expected.  Cinebench is a nice program for measuring performance, but let’s build up some heat and do some stressing.

To stress, we will be using FinalWire’s AIDA64

 

I try to run the test on the machine for at least 15 minutes to get a good heat buildup, though this test ran 19 minutes and 32 seconds and you can see it reached a max temp of 60°C, 1° higher than from the Cinebench benchmark.  You can see that the CPU was running at 100% the entire time from the bottom half of the screenshot above.

How about some comparisons,

A 75.86% difference between idle and full load, that’s pretty nice.  Each core had its own temperature but I listed only the hottest because that is what will count.

What’s a test without overclocking, well no worries, here it is.  I overclocked this system to 4.6GHz, I will show you the BIOS settings here for the 4.6GHz OC.

For those of you interested, here are my overclocks, nothing major at all, I know you and I can go higher but this is to give you an example of what it does.

Let’s check out the idle temps

Even though it will be the same as before because of the power profile change, I will list CPU-Z results.

To start things is Cinebench

A small bump in the overclock brings us to a score of 915, up from the stock speeds score of 845, a 7.95% increase in performance.

With the overclock though, of course it will get a bit hotter.  On previous stock test with Cinebench it reached 59°C but now with the overclock it hit 68°C, a 14.17% increase on temperature, of course higher on the overclock, but again that is to be expected yet we can see that this is still a very acceptable temperature, nowhere near 100°C, so you have plenty of room to overclock even higher.

Now for the real test, check out what AIDA64 shows.

On stock AIDA64 reach 68°C and overclocked 78°C on the hottest core, a 10°C difference 13.70% higher but still manageable. It looks like the Arctic Freezer 240 Liquid Cooler can hold its own.

So let’s throw the comparisons on the graph to see how well it does.

 

Another good comparison is how well this stacks up to a good air cooling CPU cooler, for this I will refer to my Rajintek Tisis CPU heatsink.

First off, I will compare the stock cooling, I won’t show the pictures here of the above HWMonitor tests, you can see them above, but I will show you the HWMonitor results of the Rajintek Tisis.

So very decent temps and I do love air cooling heatsink but the idle temp here is 31°C versus the Arctic Freezer 240’s 27°C, a 13.79% increase on the air cooling but this is idle.

Here is the Tisis with the overclocked Core i7 4790K again at 4.6GHz with the same settings at idle.

As you can see above, the lowest idle temp was on the Rajintek Tisis was 34°C versus the Arctic Freezer 240’s 28°C, the Tisis was 19.35% hotter.  Oddly enough though the highest temperature on the Tisis at idle was 49°C and the Freezer 240 was 66°C, in this case the Freezer 240 was 29.57 hotter, I can’t explain it but you haven’t see the real tests, let’s see what happens in Cinebench.  I will compare all 4 temps here.

So we can see here in mostly all tests the Arctic Freezer 240 came ahead in all of the tests.  At stock, the Tisis comes in at 10°C hotter, a 15.38% difference above the Freezer 240.  Stressing on Cinebench we can see there was only a 5% difference, the Tisis came at 73°C while the Freezer 240 came in at 68°C, not bad against liquid cooling but still higher.

This is a relatively quick test, let’s see what AIDA64 reveals.

We can see here that when stressed for longer than maybe a minute or two, the heat built up too quickly on the Tisis overclock bringing it up to 89°C but with the liquid cooling it kept it at a chilly 78°C.  Percentage wise, the Arctic Freezer 240 beat out the Rajintek Tisis by 13.17% and again, you have room to go higher.

Now, I know you might think (or hope) that this was the end, but it is not.  When I installed this cooling unit, I placed it on the front of the case, because this Fractal Design Define S could take it, maybe your case can too but this case can also take it on the top, so I will show you how to install it on the top and then also perform comparative testing comparing the difference in cooling from the top and the front, both stock and overclocked.

[nextpage title=”Changing the position of the Arctic Liquid Cooling Unit Radiator”]

First, check out the install video, well more like, the video showing you how to move it from the front to the top.

OK, easy enough, now for the comparisons.

[nextpage title=”Comparing Liquid Cooling Positioning Performance”]

Let’s start off with idle temps.

Interesting, so it seems that from the top or the front, there was no difference even though when this unit is on the top, there is an additional fan on the front of the case (the fan that was there before I installed the Arctic Freezer 240) blowing cool air over the board and components.  This of course is not a real test as it is only representing idle temps and how hot the CPU got during windows login, but it is a point to reference.

So now let’s take a look at the difference between the 2 in Cinebench.

Before referencing the temperature, please note that with the liquid cooling unit on the top, it actually performed lower by 3 points on the Cinebench test.  Now let’s move on to the temps.

Well, I though the front it looks like even the temps were higher on the top oddly enough.  I thought, I am sure as well as you did that they would be cooler on the top.  Since Cinebench is a short test the temps might be OK, though still odd on the drop in performance, while not much it is still there.  Let’s check out a much longer test stressing on AIDA64.

This makes a lot more sense, while there is not a lot of difference, the top mounted Arctic Freezer 240 cooled 4°C a 5.26% improvement, any improvement is a great improvement.

So, what does this all mean?

[nextpage title=”Final Thoughts”]

Final Thoughts

Arctic has been cooling CPU’s for years, though mostly only through air cooling though this is their first Liquid cooling venture.  From all the testing I have done and the time I have had this unit, I have had nothing but amazing performance and little to no noise from it, even when stressing this unit is close to quiet.  The first time I turned on the PC with this liquid cooling unit installed, I did a double take thinking maybe I installed it incorrectly, but no, it was on and the lights were blinking.  They did a great job not to mention, this unit is incredibly affordable.

The only complaint I do have and it could potentially be a big one is that while it is not a water cooling unit, it is a liquid cooling unit the liquid in it does not any form of anti-freeze so if it does hit below 0°C or 32°F it will freeze.  Since this is kept inside of a house, obviously with power since you are using the unit, there is a very little chance that this will ever come close to those temperature, but I did want to make that known.  If you live in an area where it does get this cold or colder, when you receive the unit, make sure you keep it in outside of the system for a day or two for the fluid to get to room temperature to turn back into liquid form.  The liquid does contain a little bit of detergent to act as an anti-algae/anti-bacterial agent to protect from those growing in the unit or tubes which can of course end up blocking the unit from functioning perfectly, so they have you covered there.

Pros

• Amazingly quiet at only .3 sone (Fans) unit itself is whisper quiet
• Very good cooling performance
• Includes 4 fans
• Intelligent and forward thinking 4-Pin Socket connections
  • Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before
• Fluid Dynamic Bearings for longer lifespan for fans
• Cools up to 350Watts TDP
• Has a wide range of Intel and AMD socket compatibility
• Great price
• Includes MX-4 Thermal Paste

Cons

• Contains only enough MX-4 Thermal Paste for 1 application, don’t make a mistake

While there is one con, it’s not a huge one, just annoys me a little since they do make MX-4 but everyone wants to make a buck, I understand.  Due to all this, I am forced to give Arctic and their Liquid Freezer 240 a 5 out of 5 Editors Choice, 100% recommended buy for those of you getting into liquid cooling and like closed loop systems.  If you prefer custom liquid cooling, this is not for you.