welcome to a very exciting Linus tech tips video you guys have asked for this
this is the performance evaluation of the kraken x40 and the kraken x60 what's
the advantage of a kraken versus uh some other liquid cooler well compared to 120
millimeter radiators it offers 36 percent more surface area which makes it
more effective for cooling with well larger fans that can push more air with
lower RPM or well no the same air with lower RPM or more air with the same RPM
yes either of those things so we're going to be checking out not only the
kraken x40 but also the kraken x60 which
has actually whoops not quite made it to
the test bench yet not every case can accommodate the kraken x40 and x60 you
have to have for the x40 a 140 millimeter fan mount that has enough
room around it for you know the tanks at the end of the radiator
and well the tanks at the end of the radiator as well as the additional
thickness that's required to have the fan and the crack and mounted there and
for the kraken x60 you have to have a dual 140 mount with enough clearance for
a rad and a fan and you have to have the
correct spacing for the mounting holes or you need to be willing to whip out a
drill and make it happen which is what we're going to be doing with the
vengeance c70 here now the vengeance c70 is our standard testing
bench so i'm going to go through our standard testing procedure really quickly here so number one is we monitor
the ambient temperature with a multi-logger thermometer so we monitor
that at the intake on the case that tells us what temperature the air being
used to cool the computer is then what we do is we correct whatever
temperatures we get to 20 degrees celsius giving you guys a normalized
temperature yes it works this way
don't doubt us on this it's okay if your room temperature goes up 10 degrees your
CPU temperature will go up exactly 10 degrees so we're reporting what you will
realistically observe in a sort of a normal climate controlled house
okay fans we do not use the fans that are included with liquid coolers yes
there is a value add to the manufacturers including better fans we
recognize that but we are looking at it in terms of the coolers with a fixed fan
usage scenario and a fixed noise level
so we're going to be using high quality Noctua fans in the case of the krakens
we are not going to be able to use our standard nff12s and we will instead be
using our standard nf a14 flx fans these
are both pressure optimized fans but the difference you'll notice is that one of
them is 140 mil and one of them is 120 mil they spin at the same RPM and are
approximately the same audible noise level so you know that holds in line
with our methodology of using them sort of in the way that we would use them
however we don't run a fan low noise adapter on this one and we do run one on
the 120 because that's how we get them running at the same RPM we always run
our benchmarks in a closed case with a real system so
in this case we're using a gtx 580 from MSI running combustor to generate a heat
load because in a real system the inside of the system will have other heat
generating components we're running a 39 30k overclocked to four gigahertz and
you can see here that we also have a procedure for mounting the fans as well
this will always have a 120. this will always be dual 120s up here except in
the case where we are replacing it with 140 millimeters in order to mount a 140
mil rad so there's the kraken x40 you can see over there what we do for our
idle test is we just idle it and what we do for our load test is we run combustor
and prime95 small fft then we take the CPU temperatures after a period of about
five minutes once they've equalized and report them to you so that's pretty much
the procedure i can't show you these numbers now because i've gone and removed the side panel and we've changed
a few things but we've already recorded numbers we're going to go ahead and mount the kraken x60 and show you guys
what we had to do to a c70 to get it to work
now with the kraken x60 what we discovered is that compatibility is
maybe not quite as much of an issue as nzxt and or other case manufacturers
would have you believe because here is the x60 mounted in a Corsair vengeance
c70 case which supposedly it doesn't work with
but we made absolutely no modifications to
the configuration whatsoever the one challenge you can see we've only mounted
it with four screws here but we could have put in all eight is that the heads
of the screws are not that big so we had to kind of sort of you know put them all
in at the same time otherwise you could kind of you could pop it through if you
didn't have all the screws in because you can see they're not quite centered
that was the only issue other than that it mounts fine the clearance is perfect
uh once we're it once we're inside we have the barbs at the back so if you had
actually here slick if you want to come around to the other side and give them a
look inside there and you'll be able to see i hope unless
your bulk blocks it so the barbs come out
right above the RAM over there if we had vrm heatsinks over there then that might
be might be a bit of an issue he wants me to take off the side panel but we
haven't recorded our temperature readings yet so why don't we do that first remember guys we take all our
temperature readings with a closed side panel so we recorded our ambience and
our load temperatures um i just want to remind you that we take the second
hottest core so in that case it's this guy at 65
and so we're going to plug that in and find out how this particular cooler
performs so this is not really what i was
expecting it does perform better than the x40 so it's about six degrees better
than the x40 also the fan or the pump is uh very satisfactory on this one we
don't hear any grinding or or whining but it doesn't perform as much better
than the h100i as i would have expected
so that still puts it at the top of our charts i want to be very clear it is
still the top performing CPU cooler that we've had run through our lab so can't
take that away from it it's possible that if we had our CPU more overvolted
or if we had a higher wattage CPU that we'd see it pull away from the h100 more
it's also possible that the
the nf f12s being a higher tech fan than
the a14s are better optimized for pressure even though both sets of fans
are running at the same RPM and the a14s are inherently larger and should
therefore be able to push more air through the heatsink uh well heat sink
radiator whatever you want to call it so here i want to show you guys how the clearance was so if you did have tall
vrm heatsinks here or up here at the top then you can see that this would not
have fit but we were able to get it in with our MSI gd65x
board just fine and you can also see that there's no interference over here
with any kind of five and a quarter inch bays as well so it's an extremely
satisfactory installation experience in spite of the fact that this case is not
listed as compatible so thank you for checking out this episode of Linus tech
tips where we've had a look at the performance of the kraken x40 and x60 if
you guys want to see our performance charts we're actually going to have a
link under the video so you can go ahead and check those out at your leisure so you
can see all of our results for various coolers on our standard test bench and
we're going to keep updating that over time don't forget to subscribe
obviously no review of the krakens would be complete without having a look at the
included software now we had CPU temperatures working before i had to
reinstall this just now so that might just be sort of a weird thing and fan
speed does work we just don't have the fans plugged in right now but i just
want to show you guys the feature so you can monitor your pump speed you can know if your pump failed you can see the
liquid temperature as well as CPU temperature so you can monitor your
deltas here's a graph of fan speed RPM as well as temperature fan settings
these are cool so you can set up a few different curves one for silent so you
can see that the fan speed here on the y-axis doesn't start ramping up until
the temperature here on the x-axis starts to get up to around 45 degrees
you can actually move these around so you can make things as extreme or
well that's a hundred so you can't really go any higher than that but
oh it's not going to let me move that no okay well interesting maybe the custom
one will let me move that oh no it just wants you sort of it wants
100 to be around 65 degrees and then you could i mean you could also just go 100
earlier if you wanted so there is a lot that you can do to play around with it
uh and then right so you can just change the dial to extreme silent or custom
whatever you prefer and light settings so it's got RGB leds inside you can
change the colors you can actually have different colors if the temperatures are
high you can have it fade and strobe at intervals and general settings are here
so you can monitor in fahrenheit if you're from the us of a
and auto start liquid temperature notifications all that kind of good stuff so
uh once again don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips for more unboxings reviews and other incomplete videos
until we come back and finish them and then they're done and then now we can actually say bye and turn the camera off