NZXT Kraken X40 Liquid CPU Cooler Review
Ryan Martin / 11 years ago
My concerns with previous liquid all-in-one CPU coolers I’ve tested have nearly always been with sound. The Corsair H55 had a fixed speed 1700RPM fan which we had to use a reducer cable with otherwise it was just way too noisy (both thermal and acoustic results for the Corsair H55 were done with the fan speed reducer cable), the Thermaltake Water 2.0 Extreme fans were PWM but started at 1200RPM which was also quite loud and the Corsair H100i experienced rattling issues which raised the overall acoustics of that product. In fact the Seidon 120M from Cooler Master was the only one I tested that had no issues.
Thankfully, NZXT’s Kraken X40 sits alongside the Seidon 120M offering excellent acoustics. There is next to no pump noise and the fans are also very quiet being able to operate as low as 800RPM.
Overclocking changes very little and we can see the NZXT Kraken X40 is still quiet compared to the competition. We did run tests with both the Silent fan profile and default motherboard PWM fan profile for the supplied 140mm fan, both returned identical results so you can really expect quite impressive acoustics however you choose to control the fans.
