Jalopeeno

90£ for Liquid Freezer II 280 at UK Amazon and depending if you choose NH-D15 with poop brown or black fans it is either 80£ or 90£. So again, about same price. 360 model seems to be 115£. Just curious, which country's prices did you use to compare price difference between NH-D15 and Kraken X53? Obliviously I cant check every country's prices. Just assumed that everybody is more than capable for doing price comparison on their own and use that information to make their choises.

But why would you choose NZXT Kraken X53, when you can get Arctic Liquid Freezer II 280 or 360, which performs better and is cheaper? Noctua NH-D15 is about same price here than Arctic Liquid Freezer II 280. Liquid Freezer II 360 costs about 10-15€ more than NH-D15. Also, I had seven (7) Noctua NF-A14 fans and all of them had very annoying pulsating sound at certain rpms (around 500 rpm and between 800-900 rpm). Returned all of them and since all seven had this same issue, I have to assume that it's a "feature" and not a bunch of defective fans.

It depends. AIO makes it easier to install and change other components (with my motherboard, you have to dismount large tower cooler to change/install M.2 SSD and graphics card (if you dont want to poke GPU release lever with long screwdriver) and tower cooler limits ram choices), build looks cleaner and generally 240mm+ AIOs perform better than tower coolers at same noise levels. Risk of quality AIO leaking is damn small. Here in Finland, Noctua NH-D15 is more expensive than Arctic Liquid Freezer II. Point with large tower CPU coolers would be zero risk of leaking and fewer points of failure.

In terms of performance, it doesn't matter. However mounting fans in pull configuration (fans up) makes cleaning dust out of a radiator easier.

If you take a look of Gamers Nexus CPU cooler benchmark (3950X OC at 100% load), both Arctic Liquid Freezer II 280 / 360 and EK AIO 360 perform better than NZXT Kraken X72. Even EK AIO 240 performs better than X72. Anyway, both Arctic Liquid Freezer II 280 / 360 and EK AIO 360 are solid choices for 3900X. EK AIO is easier to mount and has five year warranty instead of Arctics two years while Arctic Liquid Freezer II is much cheaper (if you can get one).

Knowing the socket would be helpful. When installing on Intel 15xx/1200 socket, you are supposed to use longer standoffs and shorter standoffs are for Intel 2011/2066 sockets. When installed on AM4 socket, block screws directly to the stock AM4 backplate and you should not use standoffs. Arctic Liquid Freezer II series is not compatible with AM3 socket. Animated installation instructions can be found from Arctics website: https://support.arctic.ac/index.php?p=lf2-360r2

You should also check out Lian Li's new Galahad 360 AIO. In TweakTowns review Galahad 360 performed better than Arctic Liquid Freezer II 280. Taken from few reviews, it also seems that Galahad 360 performs better than Deepcool Castle 360EX. If Toms Hardware reviews of Galahad 240 and EK AIO 240 are anything to go by, those two (Galahad and EK AIO) are about on par when it comes to cooling performance.