Kraken X40 & X60 CPU Liquid Cooler Performance Review Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
1,914 words · ~9 min read
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welcome to a very exciting Linus tech tips video you guys have asked for this
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this is the performance evaluation of the kraken x40 and the kraken x60 what's
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the advantage of a kraken versus uh some other liquid cooler well compared to 120
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millimeter radiators it offers 36 percent more surface area which makes it
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more effective for cooling with well larger fans that can push more air with
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lower RPM or well no the same air with lower RPM or more air with the same RPM
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yes either of those things so we're going to be checking out not only the
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kraken x40 but also the kraken x60 which
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has actually whoops not quite made it to
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the test bench yet not every case can accommodate the kraken x40 and x60 you
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have to have for the x40 a 140 millimeter fan mount that has enough
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room around it for you know the tanks at the end of the radiator
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and well the tanks at the end of the radiator as well as the additional
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thickness that's required to have the fan and the crack and mounted there and
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for the kraken x60 you have to have a dual 140 mount with enough clearance for
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a rad and a fan and you have to have the
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correct spacing for the mounting holes or you need to be willing to whip out a
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drill and make it happen which is what we're going to be doing with the
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vengeance c70 here now the vengeance c70 is our standard testing
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bench so i'm going to go through our standard testing procedure really quickly here so number one is we monitor
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the ambient temperature with a multi-logger thermometer so we monitor
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that at the intake on the case that tells us what temperature the air being
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used to cool the computer is then what we do is we correct whatever
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temperatures we get to 20 degrees celsius giving you guys a normalized
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temperature yes it works this way
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don't doubt us on this it's okay if your room temperature goes up 10 degrees your
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CPU temperature will go up exactly 10 degrees so we're reporting what you will
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realistically observe in a sort of a normal climate controlled house
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okay fans we do not use the fans that are included with liquid coolers yes
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there is a value add to the manufacturers including better fans we
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recognize that but we are looking at it in terms of the coolers with a fixed fan
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usage scenario and a fixed noise level
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so we're going to be using high quality Noctua fans in the case of the krakens
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we are not going to be able to use our standard nff12s and we will instead be
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using our standard nf a14 flx fans these
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are both pressure optimized fans but the difference you'll notice is that one of
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them is 140 mil and one of them is 120 mil they spin at the same RPM and are
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approximately the same audible noise level so you know that holds in line
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with our methodology of using them sort of in the way that we would use them
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however we don't run a fan low noise adapter on this one and we do run one on
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the 120 because that's how we get them running at the same RPM we always run
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our benchmarks in a closed case with a real system so
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in this case we're using a gtx 580 from MSI running combustor to generate a heat
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load because in a real system the inside of the system will have other heat
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generating components we're running a 39 30k overclocked to four gigahertz and
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you can see here that we also have a procedure for mounting the fans as well
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this will always have a 120. this will always be dual 120s up here except in
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the case where we are replacing it with 140 millimeters in order to mount a 140
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mil rad so there's the kraken x40 you can see over there what we do for our
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idle test is we just idle it and what we do for our load test is we run combustor
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and prime95 small fft then we take the CPU temperatures after a period of about
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five minutes once they've equalized and report them to you so that's pretty much
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the procedure i can't show you these numbers now because i've gone and removed the side panel and we've changed
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a few things but we've already recorded numbers we're going to go ahead and mount the kraken x60 and show you guys
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what we had to do to a c70 to get it to work
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now with the kraken x60 what we discovered is that compatibility is
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maybe not quite as much of an issue as nzxt and or other case manufacturers
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would have you believe because here is the x60 mounted in a Corsair vengeance
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c70 case which supposedly it doesn't work with
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but we made absolutely no modifications to
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the configuration whatsoever the one challenge you can see we've only mounted
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it with four screws here but we could have put in all eight is that the heads
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of the screws are not that big so we had to kind of sort of you know put them all
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in at the same time otherwise you could kind of you could pop it through if you
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didn't have all the screws in because you can see they're not quite centered
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that was the only issue other than that it mounts fine the clearance is perfect
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uh once we're it once we're inside we have the barbs at the back so if you had
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actually here slick if you want to come around to the other side and give them a
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look inside there and you'll be able to see i hope unless
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your bulk blocks it so the barbs come out
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right above the RAM over there if we had vrm heatsinks over there then that might
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be might be a bit of an issue he wants me to take off the side panel but we
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haven't recorded our temperature readings yet so why don't we do that first remember guys we take all our
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temperature readings with a closed side panel so we recorded our ambience and
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our load temperatures um i just want to remind you that we take the second
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hottest core so in that case it's this guy at 65
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and so we're going to plug that in and find out how this particular cooler
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performs so this is not really what i was
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expecting it does perform better than the x40 so it's about six degrees better
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than the x40 also the fan or the pump is uh very satisfactory on this one we
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don't hear any grinding or or whining but it doesn't perform as much better
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than the h100i as i would have expected
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so that still puts it at the top of our charts i want to be very clear it is
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still the top performing CPU cooler that we've had run through our lab so can't
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take that away from it it's possible that if we had our CPU more overvolted
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or if we had a higher wattage CPU that we'd see it pull away from the h100 more
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it's also possible that the
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the nf f12s being a higher tech fan than
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the a14s are better optimized for pressure even though both sets of fans
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are running at the same RPM and the a14s are inherently larger and should
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therefore be able to push more air through the heatsink uh well heat sink
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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
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vrm heatsinks here or up here at the top then you can see that this would not
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have fit but we were able to get it in with our MSI gd65x
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board just fine and you can also see that there's no interference over here
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with any kind of five and a quarter inch bays as well so it's an extremely
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satisfactory installation experience in spite of the fact that this case is not
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listed as compatible so thank you for checking out this episode of Linus tech
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tips where we've had a look at the performance of the kraken x40 and x60 if
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you guys want to see our performance charts we're actually going to have a
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link under the video so you can go ahead and check those out at your leisure so you
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can see all of our results for various coolers on our standard test bench and
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we're going to keep updating that over time don't forget to subscribe
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obviously no review of the krakens would be complete without having a look at the
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included software now we had CPU temperatures working before i had to
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reinstall this just now so that might just be sort of a weird thing and fan
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speed does work we just don't have the fans plugged in right now but i just
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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
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liquid temperature as well as CPU temperature so you can monitor your
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deltas here's a graph of fan speed RPM as well as temperature fan settings
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these are cool so you can set up a few different curves one for silent so you
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can see that the fan speed here on the y-axis doesn't start ramping up until
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the temperature here on the x-axis starts to get up to around 45 degrees
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you can actually move these around so you can make things as extreme or
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well that's a hundred so you can't really go any higher than that but
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oh it's not going to let me move that no okay well interesting maybe the custom
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one will let me move that oh no it just wants you sort of it wants
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100 to be around 65 degrees and then you could i mean you could also just go 100
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earlier if you wanted so there is a lot that you can do to play around with it
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uh and then right so you can just change the dial to extreme silent or custom
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whatever you prefer and light settings so it's got RGB leds inside you can
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change the colors you can actually have different colors if the temperatures are
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high you can have it fade and strobe at intervals and general settings are here
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so you can monitor in fahrenheit if you're from the us of a
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and auto start liquid temperature notifications all that kind of good stuff so
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uh once again don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips for more unboxings reviews and other incomplete videos
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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