Best Budget Liquid Cooler 2022

To have your computer run well, you must ensure it stays cool. While both Intel and AMD provide stock coolers with a decent portion of their respective CPU ranges, they’re not great. Suppose you live in an area prone to high ambient temperatures or are likely to regularly have a heavy load on your CPU. In that case, you may run into thermal throttling issues. This can happen even on lower-end CPUs that haven’t been overclocked. Of course, if you have a high-end CPU, it will put out more heat.

To manage that heat, you need a third-party cooler. While you could get an air cooler, these always dump the heat they remove into your case. They can come cheap, but the cheaper ones will be outperformed by basically any AIO. An All In One or AIO liquid cooler offers trouble-free liquid cooling with everything in one self-contained unit needing no maintenance.

Even a standard 120mm AIO can outperform most air coolers, which come much bigger than that, while remaining affordable. One of their advantages is that they can be set up to exhaust hot air directly outside your case. Keeping the internal ambient temperature low for optimum cooling performance.

A 120mm AIO can cool a high-end CPU. It’s generally worth pairing the more powerful CPUs with more powerful AIOs. While this does increase the price a bit, things can stay affordable. With even 360mm AIOs being available from respected brands for less than $100.

To help you find the best liquid cooler for your budget builds, we’ve drawn up our list of the best budget water coolers in 2022.

The EVGA CLC 120mm is simple bare bones, with no frills, 120mm AIO. It comes with a water block pump combo, a 120mm class radiator, and a 120mm fan. It should be compatible in any case, though some small form factor cases might not support AIOs. There isn’t any RGB lighting included.

The fan can be swapped out, allowing you to add RGB lighting. The default fan is quiet, at just 20 dbA. EVGA is a well-known brand and offers a solid 5-year warranty. Combined, those help to give a sense of confidence in the build quality. The Amazon listing is very old and hasn’t been updated to list compatibility with newer CPU sockets. However, it does support at least some unlisted ones with extra mounting hardware being supplied.

The Arctic Liquid Freezer II 120 is another 120mm AIO. This one has a couple of tricks up its sleeve, quite literally, in fact. The cable for the fan, which would typically be loose and flapping about, is run inside the tube sleeving. This reduces the number of cables you need to tidy away. It also features a unique 40mm VRM fan on the water block. The Voltage Regulator Modules or VRMs are located next to the CPU socket and can get hot. Cooling them doesn’t offer any direct performance benefit but may help with overclocking stability.

For maximum protection, the tubes have braided sleeving. A respected brand provides a six-year warranty, so you can trust it. The downside of the fan cable being included in the sleeving is that you can’t easily replace it. Despite being the same 120mm size as the EVGA CLC 120, it’s a bit more expensive. It doesn’t really offer a performance benefit for that price increase.

The Cooler Master MasterLiquid ML280 Mirror is unique in this list of AIOs. Most coolers use the standard 120mm fans. However, there is a larger standard of 140mm. This AIO uses a pair of 140mm fans for a 280mm class AIO. This gives a significantly increased cooling area, just slightly short of the 360mm triple 120mm AIOs.

The fans don’t have RGB lighting, but the pump shroud does. It features an infinite mirror with addressable RGB lighting. For motherboards without addressable RGB headers, an RGB controller is included. One thing to be aware of is that not all computer cases support 140mm fans. Make sure to double-check compatibility.

The Thermaltake TH360 ARGB Motherboard Sync Edition is a large 360mm AIO. While larger radiators are available in the custom liquid cooling market, this is generally the largest size available for AIOs. It’s worth noting that 360mm radiators are generally overkilled for anything other than high-end CPUs.

The fans and the pump all have addressable RGB lighting controlled by the motherboard. An RGB controller is also included if your motherboard doesn’t support addressable RGB lighting. The black version squeaks in at a single cent under $100, while the white version is $2 more. Ensure that your case supports 360mm radiators, as not all will.

That was our roundup of the best budget liquid coolers in 2022. Have you recently bought a liquid budget cooler? What sold you on it, and what has your experience been with it so far? Let us know down below.