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Used for: 6–12 months
Round LCD is bright and actually useful
CAM has to be running for the screen to do much
The Kraken sits on a 9800X3D and it has never had to work hard. The LCD showing coolant temperature is the bit I use daily, and CAM has behaved itself since the early updates.
Used for: Less than a month
Superb cooling and the best looking block I have owned
CAM is heavy and pushes an account at you
Fitted this as the centrepiece of a build I had been planning for a long while, and it mostly lives up to the billing. The cooling is excellent. A 360 with these fans holds a hot chip comfortably and the pump is silent from a metre away. The block is beautifully made, the infinity mirror ring around the screen is the nicest lighting I have had on a cooler, and the mounting hardware went on without any swearing. What costs it a star is CAM. To get anything on the screen beyond a default you install NZXT's software, it wants an account prompt on first run, and it sits in the background using more memory than a fan utility has any business using. Once configured it is fine, but the setup evening was more irritating than it needed to be. Three weeks in and I have not had to touch it since.
Used for: 3–6 months
Brilliant cooling
Software is bloated
Cools brilliantly, and the screen is a lovely touch
Used for: Less than a month
Twelve degrees better than the cooler it replaced
Faint motor tone from the fans at low speed
Compared with my previous cooler the difference is stark. Same chip, same case, same fan curve, and the package temperature under a long load is about twelve degrees lower. The screen is the reason most people buy it and it is genuinely good, bright enough to read across a desk and sharp enough that small text works. I have it on a plain temperature readout. The fans are quiet but they do have a slight motor tone at very low RPM.
Used for: More than a year
Pump gurgles after a year and temperatures have crept up
The pump has developed a gurgle that comes and goes just past a year in, usually worst for the first ten minutes after a cold start. Temperatures have crept up by five or six degrees over the same period, which suggests air has got into the loop somewhere. For a cooler at this price I expected more than a year of quiet running, and there is nothing a user can do about a sealed loop.
Used for: 3–6 months
Eats both spare USB headers and needs CAM resident
Hardware wise this has been very good, so the mark down is entirely about what it demands from the rest of the machine. The pump needs a USB header for the screen, the fans want their own controller, and between them they used both spare headers on my board. Add CAM sitting in the tray and you are running quite a lot of infrastructure for a cooler. Five months later, that is still the only thing that grates.
Used for: 1–3 months
First thing everyone notices is the screen on the pump. Mine shows a coolant temperature and a small graph, which is more useful than the animations. Cooling a 285K it holds the mid seventies under load without the fans getting loud.
Used for: 6–12 months
Cold, silent and lovely to look at
Cold, silent, and a gorgeous screen
