NZXT Kraken x62 Review

For those of you who are interested in water cooling your CPU without being forced to spend a lot of money or create a custom water loop, an All-In-One (AIO) may be the answer for you. The most recent AIO I have put to the test is the Kraken x62 AIO from NZXT, but how did it perform?

To fully test the Kraken X62 I put it to the test on my Intel i7 8700K which is currently overclocked to 4.9GHz across all six cores, twelve virtual. This chip comes stock at 3.7GHz, but as you can see has plenty of overclocking headroom. This was mounted in my Thermaltake Core P90 Open Air case with an ambient temperature of around 76 degrees Fahrenheit, 24.4 Celsius. The room used for testing is thermal controlled and throughout the test never rose above 77 degrees Fahrenheit, 25.0 Celsius.

To ensure tests are valid I ran a series of tests including Seti@Home and Prime95, both of which were very effective at dumping heat into the loop. Baseline tests, at idle, has the CPU running at 98 degrees Fahrenheit or 37 degrees Celsius. This is higher than ambient, but it is to be expected, the i7 8700K does put off a fair amount of heat, especially when overclocked, even at idle. I do think that these numbers are higher than they should be though at idle considering an open air case and a temperature controlled room. Remember, my office is temperature controlled at 76 degrees or 24.4 Celsius.

With idle temps established I began by running Prime95 in Small FFTs mode, used to generate heat, for just over an hour to ensure the loop stabilized, which it did and the results were a little shocking. The average for this test was 195 degrees Fahrenheit or 91 Celsius. This was much higher than I anticipated and resulted in thermal throttling at times. The max temp was 202 degrees Fahrenheit or 94.4 Celsius.

I then ran Seti@Home for an hour, after allowing the loop to cool to idle temps, and the results were expectedly better, although not by much. In this test, the max temp was 194 degrees Fahrenheit or 90 Celsius with an average of 189 degrees Fahrenheit or 87 Celsius. In both tests, the CPU did thermal throttle and reduced its clock speed to avoid damage.

I wanted to know if an air cooler could manage to outperform the Kraken X62 so I threw a Cooler Master Hyper 212x air cooler and then reran the tests. While it started off strong, the air cooler was simply not able to keep up after about a minute of Prime95 in Small FFTs mode and resulted in the system shutting down completely to avoid damage.

The last test that I ran was to move the entire system out of the P90 case and put it in a traditional case that has strong air flow. My thought was that maybe the radiator was not getting enough fresh air and as a result was inflating the temperatures.

I moved the system to a Fractal Design Meshify C White mid-tower case with the radiator front-mounted and two 140mm fans on top exhausting and one back mounted 120mm also exhausting. The radiator fans were intaking from the front resulting in a nice flow from front to back, although there was positive pressure in this configuration.

The temperatures after testing again did come down by approximately 5 degrees Fahrenheit in this configuration which did surprise me a little considering the rules of thermodynamics. My only guess is that while the open air case does allow for more potential airflow, it was not under a fan or an air conditioning vent which could have been hampering the temperatures. It was such a small margin though that it did help seal my suspicions about this AIO.

My final conclusion is that the Kraken X62 is stylish, easy to install, easy to maintain, and will get the job done under a normal, or moderate overclocking situation. When it comes to an extreme situation, like the one I have set up here, I still recommend a larger radiator and a custom loop. At a minimum an AIO with a larger radiator to help bleed off that excess heat quicker.

Ultimately, for this price, I recommend looking at other options, or even spending a bit more and getting into an EK Fluid Gaming A240 setup. It is not quite an AIO, but may as well be with how easy it was to install and setup.