ARCTIC Liquid Freezer III 420 - CPU AIO Water Cooler, Water Cooling PC, Intel & AMD, Efficient PWM-Controlled Pump, Fan: 200–1700 RPM, LGA1851 and LGA1700 Contact Frame - Black

TL;DR: Mounts to AMD easier or as easy as a well known Noctua air cooler if you leave the mounting brackets on the motherboard loose before threading on the water block/pump to the brackets. Cooling performance is WAY above and beyond the best air coolers also while being able to lower the fan speed and run very quiet to dead silent while idling/webbrowsing (NO DISCERNIBLE CONSTANT PUMP NOISE - VERY QUIET). FIVE STAR FROM PLACING ORDER TO FINISHED BUILD!*Note: there was about a 4-5 second slight 'gurgling' sound during the initial powering on of the system after installing but appeared to be just some air bubbles in the pump that got pumped up to the radiator and that initial sound never returned after that initial 4-5 seconds of the initial power on after installing - it's been dead silent from then and thereafter multiple days of use even taking the side panel off and putting my ear up close to the side you still can't hear any discernible sound from any type of pump for those like me who like more silent builds and was worried about reading about pump noise in liquid cooling systems.Long Version:First things first, about the bad reviews/complaints about AMD mounting simply leave the two black mounting brackets that you attach to the motherboard fairly loose before attaching the water block/pump to the brackets and then it becomes easier than even installing a Noctua air cooler because on a Noctua air cooler you have to first remove the fan off of the heatsink after unboxing to tighten down the screws of the cooler to the mounting brackets and then reattach the fan back to the heatsink when done. So as long as you leave those brackets loose and tighten them down after attaching the water block, the ARCTIC Liquid Freezer III 420 becomes easier to install than even a Noctua air cooler! SO DON'T LET THE VARIOUS REVIEWS OF AMD INSTALLATION DIFFICULTY THWART YOU FROM BUYING, ITS REALLY SIMPLE AND EASY!!!Next, it cools MUCH better than a top of the line Noctua NH-D15S air cooler! And yes I even use the special AMD offset mounting brackets on the Noctua. I read a lot of people commenting in various places on the net from forums to Youtube comments that a top air cooler is comparable to a top liquid cooler, definitely not this 420mm one! On a 16 core Ryzen 9 9950x it dropped around 10 to 13c just sitting there idling and under full all core Prime95 CPU torture test even more since the Noctua would ramp up to my 85C thermal limit set in the bios (THIS IS EVEN UNDERVOLTING THE CPU!) and the ARCTIC Liquid Freezer III 420 would peak at 67c using the default out of the box fan curve in the bios of the MSI MAG X670E motherboard which was around similar sound output or lower than the Noctua but I set a custom fan curve in the bios to make the liquid cooler more dead silent and only gained 4c and peaked at 71c while under sustained prime 95 torture test.So now assuming that the CPU might of went higher than the 85c limit I had set in the bios on the Noctua air cooler, peak temp drop could of been even more than 18c! But even assuming that it didn't and 85c was what the Noctua peaked at, even with an undervolt, that's still a whopping 18c drop in temp out of the box! And the fact that you can spin the fans way down to near silent (including the case fans since you're not dropping CPU heat output back into the case) and only gain 4c from the out of the box fan curve to a more silent fan curve peaking at 71c during prime 95 torture test that's still a huge jump in performance from 85c of the Noctua while it throttled the fan to 100% noisey speed to the 14c drop running the fans of the ARCTIC Liquid Freezer III 420 at near silent! IDK about you, but I like a silent/quieter running sytem WHILE still performing dramatically better!Anyhow I was reluctant to purchase this as my first liquid cooler because Amazon gave warning that it was a frequently returned item. That had me worried that something might be inherently wrong with this model but I still wanted to experience liquid cooling for my first time and there was other glaring reviews across the net. I'm glad that I went with this one because the performance to price is phenomenal with lowering CPU temps while being quieter than and as cheap as top air cooling like Noctua and the installation on AMD was easier than even installing a well known Noctua air cooler as long as you leave the mounting brackets loose before threading on the screws of the water block/pump to the brackets.So if you were like me on the fence and reading reviews from people that the top air coolers are comparable to liquid cooling definitely not this 420 liquid cooler! It was nice to drop temps so much and get so much more quieter! Especially when you have a high core count higher end CPU like the Ryzen 9 9950X! When you read user reviews that say that the current AMD chips are a less power consuming and cooler running chip than say an Intel i9 14900k, don't assume that you're just going to get a high core count AMD Ryzen 9 9950X and it's going to be some easy to cool chip because it's a boiler in itself and I found that traditional but top notch air coolers like the Noctua had to get a little noisey to handle the high core count chips like the 9950X but the ARCTIC Liquid Freezer III 420 AIO Water Cooler makes easy work of it while being able to lower the fan speed noise on top of it. I love my silent running ARCTIC Liquid Freezer III 420 PC!Oh and, the case used was an Antec Flux Pro. Nothing from the out of the box settings of the Antec FLux Pro had to be tweaked to fit the ARCTIC Liquid Freezer III 420 to the top mount, not even having to lower the front three fans in the case. The Antec Flux Pro & ARCTIC Liquid Freezer III 420 make a perfect match and combo and work great together right out of the box! I ordered them both together from Amazon and they both came in 1 and 2 days (1 day for the cooler, and 2 days for the case)! 10 stars IMO!

Big bulky but so very good and quiet. It does take some thinking to install and connect but easily the best AIO coolers I have owned.

Great cooler. One of the easiest and quickest to install. I have it cooling my overclocked 285k. With my E cores at 5.0ghz, ring, ngu and d2d overclocked as well, and it stays in the low 60's in games. Quiet too. It also fit my Antec Flux Pro with ease.

An installation can be this difficult. I think the engineers worked specially for this. If you can install it, the cooling is good. If you can put up with the pump noise. You probably won't be able to put up with the pump noise. You'll have to make the pump speed 50%. So that good cooling will be lost.

I am basing my review off the smaller size. I bought this larger one and my measurements were wrong, and it didn’t fit. I had to return for the smaller one. But this does not reflect badly on this cooler. The smaller one is AWESOME. I can keep the CPU within a comfortable range without too much noise from fans even when I use a tool to peg it at 100% for a while for testing. You need to take some time to adjust the curves for the coolant pump and fan so that it is very quiet all the way up to the point where the CPU is under stress and needs more active cooling. It’s not very complicated and you will be thrilled to edit your video or denoise your photos or play your game .. all with a quieter solution than almost any other one.

Wow! I didnt know I was throttling my 12900K so much! My computer is so much faster after swapping this AIO in for a cheap air cooler. The issue is that it doesnt fit in most cases! Also, there is no way to check the temperature at any point in the loop, as well as limited control over the speed of the pump and fans. Oh, and NO RGB!

There's a distinct part me of me that wants to call this all a "me problem" and give the unit 5/5. However, as somebody who has designed things, there are oversights too glaring to not address in any review, no matter how short. Thus, it's a solid 3/5 for me, and that is with no shortage of charity.Does it tame one of the hottest consumer CPUs on the market? Yes. Was it easy to install? Absolutely not. Even in a large case like a Fractal Design: Define 7, this radiator is a monster. I had to modify my Define 7 chassis by adding several holes so that the radiator would mount properly, in addition to giving up drive bay space. I also had to have the right screws to do so, the correct bit sizes, the lighting and indeed needed to leverage my crude machining experience so as to not send soft-steel burrs and turnings all throughout the case. (Use a small powerful magnet to collect burrs and turnings, as well as a nonconducting cutting fluid. Such as, a drop of automatic transmission fluid (ATF.)This is about as deep into getting something to fit into a case as anybody wants to go, and migrating to a larger chassis is often prohibitively expensive and introduces serious hazard to any build.It does its job exceedingly well and for the price that's difficult to beat, however it's incredibly bare bones and the install can go haywire in a hurry. If it didn't exhibit exemplary performance, I'd be giving it 1 star.