 Welcome to a very exciting Linus Tech Tips video. You guys have asked for this. This is the performance evaluation of the Kraken X40 and the Kraken X60. What's the advantage of a Kraken versus some other liquid cooler? Well, compared to 120 millimeter radiators, it offers 36% more surface area, which makes it more effective for cooling with, well, larger fans that can push more air with lower RPM, or, well, no, the same air with lower RPM or more air with the same RPM. Yes, either of those things. So we're going to be checking out not only the Kraken X40, but also the Kraken X60, which has actually, whoops, not quite made it to the test bench yet. Not every case can accommodate the Kraken X40 and X60. You have to have, for the X40, a 140 millimeter fan mount that has enough room around it for, you know, the tanks at the end of the radiator and, well, the tanks at the end of the radiator, as well as the additional thickness that's required to have the fan and the Kraken mounted there. And for the Kraken X60, you have to have a dual 140 mount with enough clearance for a rad and a fan, and you have to have the correct spacing for the mounting holes, or you need to be willing to whip out a drill and make it happen, which is what we're going to be doing with the Vengeance C70 here. Now, the Vengeance C70 is our standard testing bench, so I'm going to go through our standard testing procedure really quickly here. So number one is we monitor the ambient temperature with a multi-logger thermometer. So we monitor that at the intake on the case. That tells us what temperature the air being used to cool the computer is. Then what we do is we correct whatever temperatures we get to 20 degrees Celsius, giving you guys a normalized temperature. Yes, it works this way. Don't doubt us on this. It's okay. If your room temperature goes up 10 degrees, your CPU temperature will go up exactly 10 degrees. So we're reporting what you will realistically observe in a sort of a normal climate-controlled house. Okay, fans. We do not use the fans that are included with liquid coolers. Yes, there is a value add to the manufacturers, including better fans. We recognize that, but we are looking at it in terms of the coolers with a fixed fan usage scenario and a fixed noise level. So we're going to be using high-quality Noctua fans. In the case of the Krakens, we are not going to be able to use our standard NFF12s, and we will instead be using our standard NFA14FLX fans. These are both pressure optimized fans, but the difference you'll notice is that one of them is 140 mil and one of them is 120 mil. They spin at the same RPM and are approximately the same audible noise level. So, you know, that holds in line with our methodology of using them sort of in the way that we would use them. However, we don't run a fan low noise adapter on this one, and we do run one on the 120 because that's how we get them running at the same RPM. We always run our benchmarks in a closed case with a real system. So in this case, we're using a GTX 580 from MSI running combustor to generate a heat load because in a real system, the inside of the system will have other heat generating components. We're running a 3930K overclocked to 4 GHz, and you can see here that we also have a procedure for mounting the fans as well. This will always have a 120. This will always be dual 120s up here, except in the case where we are replacing it with 140 millimeters in order to mount a 140 mil rad. So there's the Kraken X40. You can see over there what we do for our idle test is we just idle it, and what we do for our load test is we run combustor and Prime95 small FFT, then we take the CPU temperatures after a period of about five minutes once they've equalized and report them to you. So that's pretty much the procedure. I can't show you these numbers now because I've gone and removed the side panel and we've changed a few things, but we've already recorded numbers. We're going to go ahead and mount the Kraken X60 and show you guys what we had to do to a C70 to get it to work. Now with the Kraken X60, what we discovered is that compatibility is maybe not quite as much of an issue as NZXT and or other case manufacturers would have you believe because here is the X60 mounted in a Corsair Vengeance C70 case, which supposedly it doesn't work with, but we made absolutely no modifications to the configuration whatsoever. The one challenge, you can see we've only mounted it with four screws here, but we could have put in all eight, is that the heads of the screws are not that big. So we had to kind of sort of, you know, put them all in at the same time. Otherwise you could kind of you could pop it through if you didn't have all the screws in because you can see they're not quite centered. That was the only issue. Other than that, it mounts fine. The clearance is perfect. Once we're inside, we had the barbs at the back. So if you had actually here, so like if you want to come around to the other side and give them a look inside there and you'll be able to see I hope unless your bulk blocks it. So the barbs come out right above the RAM over there. If we had VRM heatsinks over there, then that might be might be a bit of an issue. He wants me to take off the side panel, but we haven't recorded our temperature readings yet. So why don't we do that first? Remember guys, we take all our temperature readings with a closed side panel. So we recorded our ambience and our load temperatures. I just want to remind you that we take the second hottest core. So in that case, it's this guy at 65. And so we're going to plug that in and find out how this particular cooler performs. So this is not really what I was expecting. It does perform better than the X40. So it's about six degrees better than the X40. Also the fan or the pump is very satisfactory on this one. We don't hear any grinding or whining, but it doesn't perform as much better than the H100i as I would have expected. So that still puts it at the top of our charts. I want to be very clear. It is still the top performing CPU cooler that we've had run through our lab. So can't take that away from it. It's possible that if we had our CPU more overvolted or if we had a higher wattage CPU that we'd see it pull away from the H100 more. It's also possible that the NF-F12s being a higher tech fan than the A14s are better optimized for pressure, even though both sets of fans are running at the same RPM. And the A14s are inherently larger and should therefore be able to push more air through the heatsink. Well, heatsink, 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 VRM heatsinks here or up here at the top, then you can see that this would not have fit, but we were able to get it in with our MSI GD65X79 board just fine. And you can also see that there's no interference over here with any kind of five and a quarter inch bays as well. So it's an extremely satisfactory installation experience in spite of the fact that this case is not listed as compatible. So thank you for checking out this episode of Linus Tech Tips where we've had a look at the performance of the Kraken X40 and X60. If you guys want to see our performance charts, we're actually going to have a link under the video so you can go ahead and check those out at your leisure so you can see all of our results for various coolers on our standard test bench. And we're going to keep updating that over time. Don't forget to subscribe. Obviously, no review of the Kraken's would be complete without having a look at the included software. Now, we had CPU temperatures working before. I had to reinstall this just now, so that might just be sort of a weird thing. And fan speed does work. We just don't have the fans plugged in right now. But I just want to show you guys the features. So you can monitor your pump speed. You can know if your pump failed. You can see the liquid temperature as well as CPU temperature. So you can monitor your deltas. Here's a graph of fan speed RPM as well as temperature. Fan settings, these are cool. So you can set up a few different curves, one for silent. So you can see that the fan speed here on the y-axis doesn't start ramping up until the temperature here on the x-axis starts to get up to around 45 degrees. You can actually move these around. So you can make things as extreme or... Well, that's 100, so you can't really go any higher than that. But... Well, it's not going to let me move that. Oh, okay. Well, interesting. Maybe the custom one will let me move that. Oh, no. It just wants you sort of... It wants 100% to be around 65 degrees. And then you could... I mean, you could also just go 100% earlier if you wanted. So there is a lot that you can do to play around with it. And then... Right. So you can just change the dial to extreme, silent or custom, whatever you prefer. And light settings. So it's got RGB LEDs inside. You can change the colors. You can actually have different colors. If the temperatures are high, you can have it fade in strobe at intervals. And general settings are here. So you can monitor in Fahrenheit if you're from the U.S. of A. And auto-start, liquid temperature notifications, all that kind of good stuff. So, once again, don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxing reviews and other incomplete videos 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.