To counteract the negative note of the last page, and to be fair, Artic will send you an M.2 heatsink if and only if your motherboard is on their short list of officially affected motherboards. Sadly, this M.2 cooler needs an upgrade as it is nowhere near as impressive as the ALF 3 design.
As you can see it is a low-profile, solid aluminum, 2-piece “snap-fit” style cooling solution… that only weighs 1.5oz. Which is well below our comfort level for 10watt’er NVMe PCIe 5.0 SSDs. So while it would be ‘tolerable’ for PCIe 4-based M.2 drives. That is cold comfort if you are forced to use it because Arctic didn’t want to make their ‘block tall enough to nullify this issue, nor offer a copper and heat pipe option that could handle 10+ watts of heat output.
Ooof… and oooooof again. Thankfully, it is not a complete deal breaker as good 3rd party M.2 coolers do exist and are not expensive. More importantly, not every, let alone most, motherboards are going to be impacted by this issue. By the same token Arctic needs to invest a couple of bucks in a heat pipe-based solution as this freebie is basically worth every penny you pay for it. Put bluntly if Sabrent can do it, Arctic can do it. They just need to put their back into it.
Sadly, this segues into the size of the cold plate. As we all know anything that is not covered by the cold plate is not going to get cooled. Back in the ALF 1 days Artic had a cold plate big enough to offer HEDT coverage and laughed at Intel and AMD consumer CPU I.H.S. sizes. Intel and AMD have both since gone to bigger I.H.S… and yet AIO cold plate sizes have not kept up. This is why AMD ‘offset mounting’ was required… as the cold plate was not big enough to handle the hotspot’s change in location. In the ALF 2 days this additional mounting option was an acceptable compromise. However, with the ALF 3 Arctic has not increased the cold plate dimensions of ~32×28.5mm. Instead, all they did was bake the AMD offset directly into the block.
Sigh.
This means that one cannot turn the block 180 degrees to eliminate the M.2 z-height restriction issue. This is why you can’t even twist the block 90 degrees to give the M.2 port some cooling and the VRM some cooling. Instead, you can only install the ALF 3 one way. The Arctic Way. Everyone likes to joke about the rigidity of zee Germans and zee Swiss Engineers, but this is taking things too far (and well into “toilet trained with a shotgun” territory). System builders should be given the luxury of choosing to use or not use an offset. To choose what direction to install a block. The freedom to make a custom system their way. This rigidity and inflexibility hopefully will be changed in future revisions… by taking advantage of the better pump and using a bigger cold plate.
Thus with this block not being perfect, the ALF 3 280 is a great example of “five steps forward and two steps back”. Hopefully in the future things will be tweaked to minimize these issues… which known Arctic will happen at some point in the future. After all, Arctic is known for releasing upgraded ‘Revisions’ to their ALF line. Hell, they are known for doing it so often it is a bit of a meme in certain circles… and why we pointed out how to quickly and easily identify which revision is inside the box you are buying! In either case, the Arctic Liquid Freezer 3 280 is worthy of consideration and Arctic has baked a lot of advancements into it. Enough that most people can forgive a bit of increased installation issues.
