Below are specific instructions and build notes on how to install an Arctic Liquid Freezer II 240 on a LGA 1700 CPU and motherboard. The manufacture’s instructions in some places weren’t clear to me, hence I’ve written this post as a supplement to them.
This is part of my ‘How to Build a Music Production Computer’ series, where I show you how to build a modern music production computer, for your DAW and orchestral sample libraries.
The motherboard I’m using for my build is an Asus Tuf Gaming Z690-Plus WiFi board and the CPU I’m using is an unlocked Intel i7 12700K 12 core. You can read more about why I chose this CPU for my budget minded music production PC build by clicking here to read my article, Best Computer for Orchestral Composing.
Step 1 – Build your PC
Go ahead and build your PC to the finished product, aside from your Arctic Liquid Freezer II 240 AIO cooler. But leave the back and front doors off your case as you’ll need access to both the front and back of your motherboard to install this cooler.
It should incidentally be noted that if you’re using multiple SSD’s on your build, you should only install one, right at the point, until you’ve installed Microsoft Windows, as it will try to put certain components on multiple drives if you have more than one attached at set-up.
Step 2 – Screw the side bars onto the pump assembly
Go ahead and toss back into the box the screw package labeled ‘AMD’. You won’t be using that package for this Intel installation.
Now, out of the packages left, find the longest two screws out of all of them. Also find the appropriate side bars, aka mounting clips. Use the pictures below to match these parts up. Test one of your two screws in one of the two screw holes on the pump assembly to make sure you have the right ones, then remove it.
To screw the side bars on, position them with their curled lips (along the edges of these bars) facing away from the pump assembly, or in other words, upwards if you have the face of pump assembly facing upward. The mouth of their ‘C’ shapes should also be facing away from the assembly as well. The manufacture’s instructions at this point are clear:
Note the dark grey object in the manufacture’s picture is the pump/fan connector wires. They’re telling you not to accidentally sandwich this wire set between the bar and the pump assembly. That would be bad.
Step 3 – mount the back plate nuts to the LGA 1700 back plate
The next step to install the Arctic Liquid Freezer II 240 on a LGA 1700 motherboard is getting your back plate ready to mount. Find the 1700 back plate. In the latest Amazon shipments (Rev 7, as published near the bar code on the box) the back plate will look like this:
Also find the nuts that go through the outer holes on the plate’s four arms. These are distinctly metal, or chrome colored, and should be easy to spot, as everything else in the screw bags is black. You’ll further need the doughnut shaped, rubbery o-rings in one of those bags.
Orient the back plate such that the middle plate section sits vertically higher than its arms. Place the nuts through their holes from the underside, and attach a o-ring to their protruding stems, as is shown in the manual:
This isn’t an error – the manual is correct
At first you’re likely thinking that such a set up seems backwards, and that if you did it the other way the nuts would fit deeper through the motherboard holes. The manufacture’s instructions at this point lead to such confusion, as they portray the nuts popping through the motherboard and protruding out of its front side:
In reality, the nuts do go into the motherboard holes, but don’t protrude out the other side. And you do indeed have to assemble them through the back plate in the manner the manufacture shows, even though they don’t stick into the motherboard holes as much as they otherwise would. This is because you want the back plate to be applying force to the big metal CPU plate it’s covering in its middle section, when the pump is fully mounted. You don’t want that force being applied directly to the motherboard, at the points where the nuts go through the holes.
Note where these nuts go through the back plate’s holes also. There are two configurations they can be in for any given hole – further from the middle of the plate, or closer to the middle – due to their and their holes’ hexagonal shape.
My motherboard (the Asus Z690 Plus WiFi Tuf Gaming model) manual instructed me to use the holes furthest from the middle. As did these Arctic Liquid Freezer II 240 instructions. So make sure the nuts are all consistently on the outermost orientation of the holes in the plate arm. This ensures that the pressure will be even when everything is tightened down in the final step.
After putting your nuts in, use the doughnut looking o-rings to keep them in place. There’s a shallow lip on the peg area of the nuts, that the o-rings must be under, for things to work out properly.
Step 4 – place the sticky washers on the front and back of your motherboard
There are two sets of four sticky washers that come with your Arctic Liquid Freezer II 240 package. One is embedded on a square-looking 2×2 paper, and one is on an elongated 1×4 paper, accommodating a row of four.
The instructions say to peel the ones off the square 2×2 paper and place them on the back of the motherboard around the holes in which the back plate nut protrusions will enter. Same deal here: there’s an inner option and an outer option, so just pick the outer option, like you did with your nut set-up from the last step. The row of four (1×4) will then go around the motherboard holes on its front face.
I found it a bit tricky to correctly place these sticky washers on the front face of the motherboard, so I would peel one off, put my computer screw driver through it, with the sticky side facing away from the hilt of the tool, and would simply place the shaft of the driver through the motherboard hole and guide the washer in place with my opposite hand’s fingers.
Step 5 – put the back plate on the back of the motherboard and attach the standoffs on the front
With your tower is sitting upright, in it’s final resting position, place the back plate’s nuts through the motherboards holes.
There’s big notch on the middle section of the back plate, giving it a unique top/bottom orientation. But which way does it go? I pointed the notch downward on my build as it just felt like it fitted better that way. But place it anyway that the inner holes in the middle of the back plate are hosting/accommodating any screws from the CPU socket’s plate screws.
With one hand holding the back plate in place, use the other to screw in the standoffs. The correct standoffs for the Intel 1700 boards are the longest ones in the set, which have identical threading posts on each end, regarding the diameters and lengths of such.
Step 6 – figure out where you’ll mount your radiator
The next step in how to install your Arctic Liquid Freezer II 240 on a LGA 1700 motherboard is to figure out where you want your radiator on the case chassis, and make sure its fans are on the correct side of it, based on what you decide. You can unscrew them and re-screw them on the other side if needed, based on which way you want the fans to blow (into the case or out of the case).
The best place to mount the radiator is on top of the tower, and it comes configured, out of the box, for this type of mount. This way it will blow hot air from the radiator upwards and out of the tower, working in the same direction as convection normally would.
Further you want your radiator to be above your pump, otherwise the pump won’t work correctly due to hydrostatic pressure, fluid convection, or an air pocket inhibiting the motive action of the water.
So if you’ve been following along in this music production PC build journey, and are using my suggested parts list to make your own computer, plan on mounting the radiator to the top of the PC:
At this point go ahead and get your radiator mounting screws ready. They’re in the pack with the shorter shafted screws with lots of washers. The smaller diameter screws are the ones you’ll need to mount the radiator directly to the top of the tower case.
The thicker diameter ones are for if your mounting the radiator fans directly to the top of the case. But if you’re doing it my way don’t do that.
Also proactively thread these smaller diameter screws through their washers and set them aside at the ready for step eight. And get your thumb screws ready as well for step seven.
Step 7 – temporarily attach the pump assembly to the standoffs
Lay your computer tower down with the face of the motherboard facing up, so that you’re looking down upon it. Temporarily attach the pump assembly to the CPU by carefully lowering it down, such that the stand off pegs penetrate the corresponding holes on the side rails (mounting clips) of the assembly.
Attach two out of four of the thumb nuts so that it’s secure. You’ll have to do this maneuver, and then screw in the thumb nuts with one hand (likely your left hand), as you hold your radiator assembly with your other, in a position near where it will be mounted. In my case it’s at the top of the tower.
Step 8 – mount the radiator
Assuming you’ve already configured your radiator to the proper orientation, it’s time to mount it.
With your left hand hold it in place at the correct position at the top of your tower. With your right hand either hand tighten down your prepped screws from step six, or mount them on a magnetic tipped screw driver and tighten them down in that fashion. Once all of them are in, tighten them down.
Step 9 – mount the pump assembly
Unscrew the two thumb screws you were using to temporarily keep the pump assembly in place while you mounted the radiator. Then pull the pump off the CPU.
Take off the protective film from the face off the pump assembly (i.e. the plate, where it will touch the CPU). Apply your thermal paste that comes with the kit to the CPU. Some people like the blob right in the middle. I did a middle blob, but also tacked on some peripheral blobs too.
Carefully lay your pump assembly back into place and use all four thumb screws to tighten it down. Don’t tighten any given one, all in one pass. Try to go back and forth, to evenly tighten them all.
Step 10 – plug you pump/fan connector wire into an AIO pin set on the motherboard.
Plug the sole connector wire, that feeds the pump and the radiator fans into the AIO pin set on your motherboard. Congrats! You’ve now installed the Arctic Liquid Freezer II 240 on your LGA 1700 motherboard!
Does the Arctic Liquid Freezer II 240 have a fan connector?
No the Arctic Liquid Freezer II 240 doesn’t have a separate fan connector wire from the wire coming off the pump. It only has one wire for the entire assembly that you need to plug into your motherboard’s AIO pin set. This one wire will run both the pump and the radiator fans.
Does the Arctic Liquid Freezer II 240 only have one connector?
Yes the Arctic Liquid Freezer II 240 only has one connector wire. Plug this wire into your motherboard’s AIO pin set and it will run both the pump and the radiator fans.
Arctic Liquid Freezer II 240’s CPU fan speed detection error in BIOS
Arctic Liquid Freezer II 240’s design, where both the pump and radiator fans are all powered by one connector wire, hooked to the motherboard’s AIO connection pins, may cause your BIOS to alert you to a CPU Fan Speed Detection Error. I think it does this because there is nothing hooked up to the CPU Fan pins on the motherboard.
To solve this I double checked that my CPU temperature was in range when running the computer. Then I disabled monitoring of the CPU Fan Speed in the ‘Monitor’ settings in my BIOS. I further downloaded two different programs for Windows to tell me what the CPU and motherboard temps are in real time. The programs were Core Temp, which lets me see the temperature of each of my 12 cores on my CPU, and Speccy, which for whatever reason would only give me my motherboard’s temperature.
Incidentally the fans that came with my chassis were stuck on full power mode, and I also had to go into the fan speed area of my BIOS and set the connection to them to PWN mode, from the default ‘Auto-Detect’ mode. That way they would obey the speed vs. temperature curves that were available in the BIOS.
Next Up
Thanks for checking out my article on how to install an Arctic Liquid Freezer II 240 on a LGA 1700 motherboard! If you’ve been following my music production computer build, you can get back to the main article by clicking here. Otherwise check out some more of my articles below, or even more on my blog by clicking here.