Coolermaster Nepton 140XL & 280L AIO Cooler Review

Performance

The idle temperatures on both the 280L and the 140XL are really good, you’ll notice that load temperatures don’t look too great, but that’s likely to do with the pump and large, which won’t kick into high gear until it really needs to. These temps look weak, but at stock load, it really doesn’t matter all that much.

Unfortunately for Cooler Master I found both of the new coolers to  be a little on the noisy side and while the fans themselves aren’t too bad, the pump is audible and you can hear it whirring away a little. I doubt you would really hear it once its installed in a chassis, but our decibel meter could hear it just fine while on the test bench.

Now we’re into overclocking territory, this is what these water coolers were made for and there is already a huge improvement in performance as those big radiators work wonders at sucking up all the heat from our CPU. The 280L is a few degrees ahead of the Corsair offerings and only a few degrees behind the new Enermax coolers. The 140XL doesn’t disappoint either and ranks pretty high up our list, beating out the Zalman water cooler by a fair margin and offering significantly lower idle temperature that virtually everything on the chart.

While I did say that the fans and pump were a little nosier on the Nepton coolers at stock, they’re pretty consistent overall and didn’t really get much louder while running them on an overclocked CPU. The 280L is our 2nd quietest under these conditions and the 140XL beat out the Corsair H75, if only by a single decibel at idle.