Arctic Liquid Freezer II 280 vs NZXT Kraken X63 280mm

\- the cooler is a bit weak, get an arctic freezer II 280 or 360 (cheap when you consider the entire system cost) or Scyth FUMA. \- you can get a PCIE ver4 NVME (SAMSUNG 980). \- 7200 RPM 8TB disk would be a much nicer selection. \- You can get a 3080 for a similar price as the 3070ti

Considering a cheap cpu fan often benchmarks better than a lot of expensive aio’s… but worth the buy in my case (ha). Just makes your PC look even cooler (ha again).

I changed from a Corsair H115i Platinum to the Arctic Liquid Freezer II 280, and it dropped temps about 10 C across the board for me on my 5800X. Corsair's hardware was fine except for their AM4 mounting mechanism. It had poor mounting pressure and especially poor over the hottest part of the heat spreader. The Arctic cooler has a very good mounting mechanism, it uses screws at each corner and comes with an offset mounting bracket for Ryzen 3000 and 5000 CPUs so it can line up the center of the coldplate with the hottest spot on the CPU heatspreader

The build features a Ryzen 5 5800X and a Gigabyte GTX 3080 Ti, so it puts out a lot of heat. For CPU cooling I have the NZXT Kraken X63 280mm AIO. My main issue is that the radiator exhausts out the side of the case, and the inside fills up with the hot air coming off the RTX 3080 Ti. A further infuriating issue is that the motherboard that I got - a Gigabyte X570-I AORUS PRO WIFI - only has one usable fan header

Ahh, the Arctic Liquid Freezer II, the excellent performing cooler for those who don't give a sh*t about RGB.

There is no performance difference between Gen 6 and Gen 5. And Gen 7 versus Gen 5 testing, X62, X63 with the same fans, same fan speeds, everything. ...

Oh and the best of all this cooler does not have LEDs! (LEDs consume energy and produce heat - so having them inside non-transparent case located under the desk is a pure waste).

In case you do have an issue, contact NZXT support and they'll provide a usb hub that works as a workaround until they can roll out Krakens with the permanent fix built in or whatever. One more thing to be aware of is that unlike what the manual says there are only 2 viable installation directions if you are planning on the screen facing right side up. It's true that there is a way to rotate the image through the NZXT CAM software but if it isn't installed in one of the aforementioned orientations then unfortunately it wont be able to rotate it to the correct orientation which seems like an odd limitation but it is what it is. Okay so the performance of this cpu cooler is good, but I was honestly expecting just a bit more cooling efficiency from this latest pump design but it misses the mark by a non-insignificant amount