is there any room left to innovate on these pre-filled all-in-one liquid
coolers that have taken the market by storm since the release of the acch lclc
almost 7 years ago NZXT hopes so and
here are their latest entrance into this crowded category the Krakens x41 and
x61 with its Factory tuning and data center DNA an Intel 730 series SSD is an
amazing choice for gamers and performance enthusiasts so let's start
with a quick overview of the similarities between these two they both
feature copper blocks with high quality thermal compound pre-applied sleeved
power in and pwm compatible power passrs
for enough fans to handle Push Pull configurations on either of the units
they also both feature an integrated variable speed pump a key Improvement in
build quality that will help reduce the noise of the unit compared to other
Solutions and they both feature Quin Flex ible nonporous tubing to keep them
running smoothly throughout their 6-year warranty period I guess finally they
both come with NC's tragically not fully square but
otherwise pretty darn good FX series 140 mm cooling fans on to the part where
they differ the radiator the x61 doesn't
change much compared to the x60 and still has a slim style dual 140 mm Rad
but the x41 got a very significant upgrade to its thickness that should
make it perform pretty similarly to a dual 120 mm slim red but with great
compatibility since it'll fit in pretty much any case that has a rear 140 mm
cooling fan spot really interested to see how that one turns out other than
that in the Box we've got the usual acitech mounting hardware the Intel
flavor of which is pre-applied with AMD stuff included in the box but that's
about it for the physicality of these coolers so let's move on to software
nxt's cam software was a bit of a mixed bag for me when I first installed the
beta and it remains a bit of a mixed bag for me now that I'm using a non beta
it's all right I guess if you're looking for rudimentary system information but
it doesn't really do anything that something else doesn't already do better
there are two main tabs right now basic and manage with NZXT intending to add
more functionality in the future basic is available on any system and gives you
some rudimentary information about your system some of it is useful like RAM
usage or temperature tracking over various periods of time and notific if
any of those monitored parameters exceed a predefined limit but it just still
feels like it needs some work the feature that should show me the biggest
RAM hogs on my system for example didn't really align with task manager uh CPU
frequency detection seems to be a little bit off compared to CPU Z the advanced
views charts don't work that well on my hardware and the way it expands and
contracts just feels a little bit clunky but the manage view only available with
supported Hardware like the new Krakens and grid Plus is where things start to
get interesting I will leave that to Luke though once you actually hook up
your Kraken you'll be able to enable it under the manage button in the bottom
right hand corner and that's when I actually get into things in this
software that I do really like you can monitor your pump speed you monitor the
temperatures of both your CPU and your GPU and you can monitor the fan speeds
of your entire computer which is pretty fantastic although in our kind of setup
not everything works 100% the main thing is that the LED control doesn't really
work very well at all although that's probably to do with the fact that these
are pre-production units and I have talked to NZXT and they've told me that
these should work by the time you guys get them and if they don't their support
will be there ready to help you right away you can also do stuff like set different fan profiles which is pretty
bog standard and you can see the liquid temperature of your unit which is pretty
cool and this is actually what pump speed is based on this isn't a custom
controled pump speed you can't set it but it will change depending on how hot
the liquid is so if your computer is running very slowly you're not doing a
ton of different things and the liquid temperature isn't very high the pump
speed will be low and the second you start doing something very intensive the
pump speed will go up next up we have the graphs which I actually found to
have no problems with even with our very pre-production setup and the graphs are
pretty cool and it's nice to have all this information logged although having
all the settings all the way up to a year is great but I not a huge fan of
the fact that they don't have anything under an hour I like just seeing like a 5minute graph and maybe a half an hour
graph cuz sometimes I'm just working on things for a very short period of time so hope they Implement that in the
future but it's not a huge deal on the notification side of things which is
kind of the last thing in this side of the software it shows you a ton of
details a little bit too much for myself I don't necessarily need a log of every
single time I've plugged in and unplugged a USB device but it's highly
customizable and you can set it to exactly what you want so if this was my unit I would just turn those
notifications off and keep other notifications on like when it warned me
that Prime 95 was running because it was using way too much my CPU that's kind of
nice to know if there's something in the background that's fing a whole bunch of my system resources and it's going to
tell me about that that's kind of cool the x61 did quite well beating out the
nhd15 in our testing and the x41 did
well beating out the h100i this is not
super surprising as these are both 140 mm coolers and the x41 particularly got
a thickness boost in this iteration of its product it's pretty impressive in a
lot of cases these days are coming with 140 mm so millim fan slot so I'm not
super surprised that this is starting to happen but it is quite interesting to
see the software definitely still needs some work but having RGB control on your
cooler is pretty cool that's a major selling point for me we see a lot of
color themed builds now you want your build to look good and this can
potentially make it look good by having a color themed block are you guys
interested in this tell me in the comments below comment on the Forum as well like dislike the video subscribe to
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I'll see you guys next time