the Kraken G10 is probably the third time that NZXT has really blown me away
with an inexpensive product that just makes the lives of system Builders
easier so the first one was their little USB internal header Hub that allowed you
to add additional headers if you didn't have enough on your motherboard this was back in the days when most boards had
like two or even one internal header the second one was the grid which is a
little fan power hub that allows you to simplify your cable management and
simplify your fan speed management and the third is this what this does is it
takes your existing there's many of them on the market acitech based liquid
cooler a CPU liquid cooler and allows you to mount it to your graphics card
effectively water cooling your video card but at a fraction of the cost of
what it would what it would cost you to go with a full custom liquid cooling
solution for your card which is really the only other option out there for
video card water cooling inside the excellent but completely unnecessary uh
soft closed cell foam packaging I mean none of this stuff is uh fragile or
anything we find the bracket itself which is available in black white and
red we find a back plate that has a variety of different mounting holes we
also find a variety of mounting hardware to go through it we find a 92 mm fan
which actually just screws onto the bracket itself and then blows air
directly at the back of the video card where the vrm and actually some of the
memory typically are in order to make sure that the card doesn't run overly
warm and finally we find an instruction manual with some included zip ties this
is a nice touch just cuz you know cable management is never a bad thing so why
would you want to liquid cool your graphics card well number one is it
gives you something to do with your you know your old aaack CPU liquid cooler
that you're not using anymore because frankly they're just not that great for
CPU cooling CPUs kick out a lot more heat than gpus overall number two is the
fact that gpus genuinely perform better
if you're able to keep them running cooler GPU Boost 2.0 and AMD's latest
power tune will actually turn up the frequency of your graphics card higher
if you are able to keep it cooler now the only things to watch out for here
are things like case compatibility you're going to have to have positions
in the case for fan mounts that are either 120 mm 90 mm like the h90 from
Corsair as well as the Kraken x40 from NZXT and you're going to have to have
ample tubing length to reach your graphics card the last thing to watch
out for is that just because a fan fits somewhere doesn't mean that you're
actually going to be able to screw a radiator in there sometimes screwdriver
clearance is going to be more of an issue for you than the actual fan
clearance so ncxt has some compatibility charts for cases a lot of their cases
are compatible with it so go check that out the other thing that they have compatibility lists for is coolers now
you'd expect NZXT to just say oh well it's compatible with the cracken this
and the cracken that no they're not they're coming out and they're saying look here's all the coolers from all the
brands that will work with our product go nuts use someone else's cooler with
that and I think that's very cool of them and then card compatibility is
being updated constantly but it's compatible with like the latest stuff
because of its very modular design so GTX 780 uh 780 Ti Titan uh 290 290x all
of these are supported and you can check out NZXT site for some you know updates
in the future about that so without further Ado let's get this baby
installed in something and we're going to take a crack at the Radeon r9290 and
see how much better it can perform with our normal standard overclock so just
letting it ramp up as high as it can with better cooling versus the stock
cooler installing the G10 really wasn't that bad it's pretty daunting when you
first look at it because it's very new and when I first started strapping it to
the card I was kind of getting frustrated but when I stopped trying to
align the words properly due to my OCD I
found it actually to be fairly easy if you there's there's a specific way
you're supposed to have the tubes going they're supposed to be kind of aligned near the top of the card so they can be
routed more easily and I was trying to have them turn towards the fan which
doesn't really work just because of how the name would have been aligned up
performance- wise the graphs pretty much say it all we saw this coming with an
r9290 we knew that water cooling it would help a lot because it got so
freaking hot so once we strap a water cooler on it like we just did we knew we
would see improvements like this but it's still kind of surprising to see how much it improved I can tell you right
now even though it's not on the graph our 780 bench marks which used to be
above the R9 290 are now below once this water cooled although that's not
entirely Fair because the 780 isn't water cooled itself well we're back to
me guys here we're going to cheat a little bit we unfortunately didn't have time to install it in an actual case so
we just ran it on the test bench but if you want to see what it looks like in a case here's some footage of the last
time we were in NZXT suite and we were actually checking this out with not one
but two Kraken g10s installed in a single chassis so yes guys it is SLI and
Crossfire compatible as long as you have adequate spacing between your PCI
Express slots and you don't need a ton of additional expansion cards so what is
there left to say about it well it makes your graphics card perform better
whether you're overclocking or not in many cases because stuff like the R9
290x and the r9290 actually throttle a fair bit even at stock speeds it makes
your graphics card run cooler which will lead to better life and it's relatively
inexpensive especially if you have an older liquid cooling unit just kind of
lying around already even a 120 mm liquid cooler although I prefer a 140 mm
is going to be more than adequate for cooling something like a GPU so this is
a fantastic product at a low price and I think it's fantastic thank you for
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