NZXT Kraken G10 Unboxing & Review
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
1,273 words · ~6 min read
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the Kraken G10 is probably the third time that NZXT has really blown me away
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with an inexpensive product that just makes the lives of system Builders
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easier so the first one was their little USB internal header Hub that allowed you
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to add additional headers if you didn't have enough on your motherboard this was back in the days when most boards had
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like two or even one internal header the second one was the grid which is a
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little fan power hub that allows you to simplify your cable management and
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simplify your fan speed management and the third is this what this does is it
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takes your existing there's many of them on the market acitech based liquid
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cooler a CPU liquid cooler and allows you to mount it to your graphics card
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effectively water cooling your video card but at a fraction of the cost of
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what it would what it would cost you to go with a full custom liquid cooling
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solution for your card which is really the only other option out there for
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video card water cooling inside the excellent but completely unnecessary uh
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soft closed cell foam packaging I mean none of this stuff is uh fragile or
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anything we find the bracket itself which is available in black white and
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red we find a back plate that has a variety of different mounting holes we
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also find a variety of mounting hardware to go through it we find a 92 mm fan
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which actually just screws onto the bracket itself and then blows air
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directly at the back of the video card where the vrm and actually some of the
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memory typically are in order to make sure that the card doesn't run overly
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warm and finally we find an instruction manual with some included zip ties this
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is a nice touch just cuz you know cable management is never a bad thing so why
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would you want to liquid cool your graphics card well number one is it
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gives you something to do with your you know your old aaack CPU liquid cooler
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that you're not using anymore because frankly they're just not that great for
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CPU cooling CPUs kick out a lot more heat than gpus overall number two is the
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fact that gpus genuinely perform better
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if you're able to keep them running cooler GPU Boost 2.0 and AMD's latest
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power tune will actually turn up the frequency of your graphics card higher
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if you are able to keep it cooler now the only things to watch out for here
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are things like case compatibility you're going to have to have positions
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in the case for fan mounts that are either 120 mm 90 mm like the h90 from
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Corsair as well as the Kraken x40 from NZXT and you're going to have to have
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ample tubing length to reach your graphics card the last thing to watch
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out for is that just because a fan fits somewhere doesn't mean that you're
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actually going to be able to screw a radiator in there sometimes screwdriver
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clearance is going to be more of an issue for you than the actual fan
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clearance so ncxt has some compatibility charts for cases a lot of their cases
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are compatible with it so go check that out the other thing that they have compatibility lists for is coolers now
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you'd expect NZXT to just say oh well it's compatible with the cracken this
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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
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brands that will work with our product go nuts use someone else's cooler with
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that and I think that's very cool of them and then card compatibility is
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being updated constantly but it's compatible with like the latest stuff
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because of its very modular design so GTX 780 uh 780 Ti Titan uh 290 290x all
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of these are supported and you can check out NZXT site for some you know updates
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in the future about that so without further Ado let's get this baby
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installed in something and we're going to take a crack at the Radeon r9290 and
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see how much better it can perform with our normal standard overclock so just
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letting it ramp up as high as it can with better cooling versus the stock
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cooler installing the G10 really wasn't that bad it's pretty daunting when you
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first look at it because it's very new and when I first started strapping it to
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the card I was kind of getting frustrated but when I stopped trying to
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align the words properly due to my OCD I
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found it actually to be fairly easy if you there's there's a specific way
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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
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routed more easily and I was trying to have them turn towards the fan which
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doesn't really work just because of how the name would have been aligned up
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performance- wise the graphs pretty much say it all we saw this coming with an
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r9290 we knew that water cooling it would help a lot because it got so
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freaking hot so once we strap a water cooler on it like we just did we knew we
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would see improvements like this but it's still kind of surprising to see how much it improved I can tell you right
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now even though it's not on the graph our 780 bench marks which used to be
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above the R9 290 are now below once this water cooled although that's not
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entirely Fair because the 780 isn't water cooled itself well we're back to
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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
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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
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time we were in NZXT suite and we were actually checking this out with not one
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but two Kraken g10s installed in a single chassis so yes guys it is SLI and
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Crossfire compatible as long as you have adequate spacing between your PCI
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Express slots and you don't need a ton of additional expansion cards so what is
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there left to say about it well it makes your graphics card perform better
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whether you're overclocking or not in many cases because stuff like the R9
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290x and the r9290 actually throttle a fair bit even at stock speeds it makes
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your graphics card run cooler which will lead to better life and it's relatively
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inexpensive especially if you have an older liquid cooling unit just kind of
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lying around already even a 120 mm liquid cooler although I prefer a 140 mm
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is going to be more than adequate for cooling something like a GPU so this is
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a fantastic product at a low price and I think it's fantastic thank you for
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checking out this video like it if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it leave a comment if you have feelings
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forget to subscribe
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he