NZXT Kraken X41 Review

Up Close:  The Cooler

Never mind the length, feel the width, or so they say.  We are of course alluding to the X41s additional girth giving it an overall increase of 24% over the original X40. NZXT also point out that as it is a 140mm based rad it has an overall surface area increase of 34% over comparable 120mm based AIOs.  We’d hope this would have a positive effect on cooling performance, but by how much remains to be seen. 

     

 

The body of the Radiator was clean and blemish free, with no evidence of bent fins or channels.  Figures for fin density aren’t given, however they appear to be on the medium to low side as seen in the pictures below.

     

 

The tubing enters the Rad half way between the mid point and rad edges so shouldn’t cause any fouling issues on surrounding hardware.  The tubing itself is extremely flexible, more so than the corrugated tubes we come across and resists kinking well, and at 400mm it’s also longer than most others on the market, meaning it should stretch to the roof, rear and perhaps the front of most medium to large cases.

     

 

The contact plate is of an Asetek deign which means it will fit the G10 GPU adapter.  NZXT have of course added their own design flair to it by incorporating an RGB illuminating logo and graphic.  The other thing you might notice about the contact plate, seen below with the Intel bracket already attached, is the vast number of cables that seem to explode from the tubing side.  These we think are going to take some careful management if we don’t want the inside of our case to look like a vipers nest.  These wires are of course wholly necessary in facilitating the monitoring and control of the fan speed, CPU temps, Liquid temps, RGB colour, and of course the pump speed, because as already mentioned in the introduction, and by NZXT several times on their website, this is a variable speed pump.

       

 

The X41 comes supplied with a single NZXT 140mm fan.  The fan runs between 800-200RPM emitting 20-37 dB(A).  As a nice bit of attention to detail NZXT have added rubber isolations to all 8 contact points on the fan, isolating it from both the case and the rad.