NZXT Kraken Elite 360 RGB AIO Cooler Review

Peter Donnell / 7 months ago

A Closer Look

Since this is a 360mm cooler, it does of course come with 3 x 120mm fans. They’re the latest F120 RGB Core, all finished in white with a seven wide-blade design that’s tuned for higher air pressure.

They’re designed to operate from as low as 500 RPM up to around 1800 RPM, which can give them 78.86 CFM, at 2.57mm H2O air pressure.

They come with all white cables, but the connectors are black, matching up with the black control hub. Of course, this stuff will likely all be hidden behind your motherboard or under a PSU shroud anyway.

The radiator looks great, but again, it’s basically all the same as the rest of the Kraken series, and comes with an all-white design too.

There’s an embossed NZXT logo down the side, but otherwise branding is kept pretty minimal and understated.

The connectors are matched in white, and matched up with some gorgeous white braiding on the tubing too.

There’s a good length to the tubing too, so larger full-tower case installations should be easily accommodated.

Plus, there are pivoting L-shaped mounts on the pump side, making it easier to get the pump installed.

The display is absolutely massive, with a 60mm diameter circular LCD display, that can display 24-bit True Colour, with an impressive 690 cd/2 brightness.

The contact plate is pretty much what I expected, as this is the latest Asetec pump, which is used on countless products around the world, and we know it to be easy to work with and reliable.

Some thermalpaste is pre-installed too, allowing you to get it installed much quicker, which is great!

The fans are easily installed, and they can be mounted on either side of the radiator to suit your needs. Now, let’s get it installed and see what the performance is like!

Test system:

NZXT Z690 ATX
Intel Core i9-12900K @ stock and & 4.9 GHz all P-Core 4 GHz E-Core 1.3v
Aorus RTX 2080
16GB Crucial DDR4 4400 MHz
512GB NVMe SSD
Thermaltake Tough Power 750W
NZXT H7 Flow RGB Case
All testing is conducted using NT-H1 thermal paste

We’d like to say a big thank you to Gigabyte, Noctua, Crucial, Intel, Thermaltake, NZXT and more for providing us with the above testing equipment and their ongoing support.

Testing Methodology

We always use Noctua Noctua NT-H1 thermal paste to make sure testing reveals the efficiency of the tested coolers not the efficiency of the bundled thermal paste
Cinebench R23 is run for 10 minutes to calculate “load” results
Unigine Superposition is run for 10 minutes to calculate “gaming” results
Multiple readings are taken with the average of the package temperatures calculated for our recorded result
Fans are left to operate at default PWM profile speeds unless otherwise stated
For water cooling tests, all pumps have been operated at 12 volts unless otherwise stated
Ambient temperatures should be between 21-23 degrees in all our tests unless otherwise stated
Acoustic measurements are taken 10cm horizontally and 10cm vertically away from the CPU cooler with the VGA fan disabled
Stock tests are performed using “out of the box” settings for the CPU
All coolers were tested under identical settings unless otherwise stated.
There is approximately a 1-degree Celsius margin of error in our temperature recording software CPUID HW Monitor
There is approximately a 1.5dBA margin of error with our Benetech GM1351 decibel meter
In all these graphs we may have a few “reference” results of particular products that do not fit within that category for comparative purposes.