good ol' arctic quality.
there is a reason why it's cheap.
Cheaper and better than 90% AIO on the market. Don't write nonsense. Have you ever had corsair,coolermaster or MSI AIO ? Those are crap, with capital C. All of them can watch and learn from arctic. One faulty AIO doenst mean its bad. EK is wannabe pro wc manufacturer, their AIOs are most overpriced crap you can buy, every single iteration of their AIO is faulty in some point.
Cheap does not always translate into bad quality. The LFII series have been around for some time and a proven track record of its performance, and this is clearly a bad batch. The majority of the AIOs out there focuses on things like ARGB and fancy LED screens that inflates the cost, even though the underlying AIO cooler performance is just average. For some people like me, I don't need the cosmetic/ surface improvements. I just want good cooling performance while keeping the noise level low. And this is where I think Arctic Liquid Freezer excels. In my experience, I had the worst experience with Corsair AIO where cooling is bad (got beaten badly by a Scythe Fuma 2), fans are noisy, requires you to install iCue software which is a resource hog, and the worst part is that it is costly for no good reasons.
People always laugh at me for buying overpriced Noctua coolers
I have yet to have a leak or performance drop due to AIO nonsense.
There are pros and cons going with AIO water cooler or big air coolers. There are more points of failure for AIO coolers, i.e. pump failure, potential leaks, coolant running low, etc, but you cannot deny the fact that a good AIO cools better and does not cause obstructions like a big air cooler. The last big air cooler that I used was the BeQuiet Dark Rock 4 Pro, and while it cools well, I had a lot of difficulties trying to remove/ install cables, adjust/ change ram, can't get to the NVME SSD below the cooler, and for some boards where the PCI-E slot is too close, removing the GPU is also a problem because you need to push down the locking mechanism for the slot, which is blocked by the heatsink.
Noctua offers the best when it comes to coolers and their famous 120mm fan. However, they are extremely pricey and given that competition have caught up in terms of introducing air coolers with comparable performance, I see little reasons to shell out that steep premium. But I guess the worth really boils down to individual preferences.