NZXT Kraken 360 RGB White AIO Cooler Review

Peter Donnell / 1 year ago

Performance

I actually tested this CPU cooler on our old bench with the 7700K, it’s an old bench and as you can see, RGB fans are pretty, but the jank of the old setup was too much…

Being able to add temperatures, loads, clocks, and even gifs to the front display is neat too, albeit, for customisation, you will need the NZXT CAM software, which I don’t mind, but I know some of you just don’t like software, but to each their own.

And I promised myself not to forget to rotate the pump LCD in the software before I reboxed it, but hey, I’m only human. Alas, I did install this cooler in our new test case, the NZXT H7 Flow ARGB, and it looks gorgeous with the NZXT cooler in there.

Aesthetics get a big thumbs up from me, but what about performance?

Stock Temperatures

Well, as I said, it’s a new bench and a new CPU, so that means we’ve wiped the very old results, and will now only be testing more high-end hardware. The i9-12900K is an absolute bugger of a CPU, turning electricity into heat in a way that sorely taxes even the best CPUs. Even the Noctua NH-D15S hits 101C at load, or +78c over our 23c recorded room ambient temperatures, while the NZXT Kraken managed to hold at +54Cc over ambient, 24c cooler than a Noctua, which is going to be hard to beat!

Overclocked Temperatures

Overclocking obviously put more strain on the CPU, but even then the idle and gaming temperatures were broadly the same, just 59C over ambient and only around 5c hotter than our stock settings, with no issue in CPU performance or any throttling occurring throughout an extended test.

Stock Acoustics

At stock, and while at idle, the Kraken sits at just 41 dBa, admittedly and pushes up to 43 dBA with the fans pushing a bit harder, but even when overclocked that’s largely the same too, and not really much different than the noise levels already coming from the four pre-installed fans on the NZXT H7 Flow ARGB case.