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NZXT CAM 2.0 Overview - Control your Kraken!

2015-04-07
this video is brought to you by NCI XCOM great technology selection and service hello everyone I'm Dimitri with Harbor Canucks and inside my workstation machine I am running this this is the Kraken x61 from NZXT this is an all-in-one liquid cooler this is a 280 millimeter radiator now this cooler is bundled up with a cam software from NZXT that allows you to change the hue on the pump here allows you to to develop different fan profiles with curves for the fan speeds depending on the temperature of the CPU the damper depending on the temperature of the liquid but also gives you some monitoring abilities of your components and your hardware but n60 is rolling out with the cam 2.0 a new version software that brings when you boost a bunch of excellent monitoring abilities that we did not see with the previous cam version and in this video we'll be taking a look at that so first let's outline what the previous over the original cam software is like and then we want to camp 2.0 to see exactly what other improvements we got all right so here's the original cam software this is the version 1.2 point for the main gripe I have with this is that you cannot resize the window so you cannot make it bigger because all these modules are pretty small you can collapse these modules as you can see but that's kind of pointless like the specifications window you know you have to scroll down to see everything and go into the Advanced Mode for some reason you lose out on RAM and storage stuff so you have to go back to the basic mode to see that here you can see the temperature of the CPU and the GPU you can cycle between those easily with color-coded temperatures and you can go into Fahrenheit and the load usage shows the top five load intensive applications and the cam software happens to be one of the most Ram heavy tasks within my application when things are an idle so it's actually consuming about 160 megabytes of RAM that is pretty high for not doing anything and the graphs that you see beside there are pretty pointless because well first of all they're tiny you can't really compare or use that information for competitive says you can cycle between the temporal scales the mins are hours days weeks and months I'm not sure why months is there and that's a little bit too much I think but it gives you a little bit information on what's happening within your Hardware within your machine these are not logged so you cannot take this information out you know put it into Excel and make your own graphs and compare this information if you're doing some review on something so this is strictly for visual aesthetics you know it is kind of pointless in that regard and heading them to the Krakken control panel the most important thing here are the custom fan curves you have the preloaded silent and performance mode the custom mode where a fan speed can be changed in five percent increments and the manual mode with constant fan speed here you can also select LED color with breathing blinking mode and unfortunately user color selection does not accurately translate to desired hue on the pump and so aside from just creating my custom fan curves and just monitoring the temperature I guess because it is right there visually I did not utilize any of the other features built in like the graphs never really look at them because they are pointless to me in the forms of comparative analysis and they're quite tiny and the same thing with the specifications and the notifications as well that don't really say anything or help me change my workflow or how I use my machine all right booting up cam 2.0 let's see what we have so it's a loading pretty quickly unfortunately for some reason it is no longer displayed in the notification menu so here it is they've done a complete redesign overhaul on the UI and it looks slightly better I think but they've still stuck around with that sort of limiting window but check this out expandable window oh yeah so in the explained window you can go into the advanced sort of expand that unfortunately this is this is as big is going to get you cannot expand it vertically nor horizontally you can't collapse it further but that fine pointless it would be nice if you could make this in your entire window or at least explain this window vertically so you can see all these graphs but we'll get that in a second so first of all GPU CPU temperatures and load very useful you can go and change the mode on the crack and cooler right away with a little drop-down menu so good silent mode save and it shows you the liquid temperature fan speed rpm of the pump and the fans very nice down here you can collapse this advanced window which shows your CPU GPU motherboard RAM HDD and net and you can also pop this window out for a little bit of extra information on the stats for the CPU the GPU and that's one thing NZXT really wanted to dive down into giving users a bit more flexibility and lots of flexibility but information on their entire system I guess it's somewhat useful where you have the minimum and maximum and the current which is kind of nice unfortunately no averages which would be really nice to see as well and that's one thing that n60 wants to do is they want to hear your input on the software so if you have any suggestions on what should be included or what should be taken out out of this latest came 2.0 release please leave it in the comments below coming back to the whole issue on what the original software was kind of lagging is the whole logging information I want to be able to start logging and have everything input into a notepad file and then I could later that import that into Excel to make my own graphs why can't they do that NZXT please give us this option and I say this because these graphs are again very pointless sure you can click on them to reveal the little bit extra so the graphs is slightly enlarged you can go back and kind of cool is shows through the top applications for that time period which is nice so it's all obvious for a for right now as I'm recording with OBS you still have the temporal scales of minutes hours and days finally or thank you for removing the weeks months I think that was kind of pointless but here you can see minimum and maximum very nice as well CPU statistics CPU load CPU load I think the little pointless shows you the five top load intensive tasks at the moment I don't like the whole idea of scrolling here I would like to have this graph window as a standalone window on its own that I can resize that would be give me a little bit more flexibility knowing what information I want to receive out of these graphs and not be locked down to this tiny window that I have to actually scroll in I'm not super happy about that you go onto the GPU same idea shows you the GPU temperatures and load and most I guess intensive applications for that time period motherboard temperatures voltages and the fan rpm Ram that's kind of cool I guess it would be cool to see how much RAM is being utilized if I am rendering a video for example and give you the load but like I said again is long you cannot blog it it's kind of useless hard drive activity so because I have I believe seven drives installed inside the system I have to cycle between these arrows in order to get to my preferred drive activity and I don't want to do that I want to be able to open that as a standalone window and monitor each single hard drive based on whatever I'm doing if I'm doing any testing on seeing what type of load is being processed or being handled by certain drive because I have certain drives as cache drives and going back to the net well they go again giving you download upload speeds on into Perl basis one thing NZXT really want to bring out is more detailed specifications and you can see that with this pop-up window and the advanced dashboard where it's giving you all the information on the CPU on the GPU let's scroll down here maxie DP is zero watts well I guess it hasn't really updated the information on the tight necks yet motherboard Ram as giving you timings on the rain now which is something that was not available in the previous version hard drive activity so HDD so I have seven yep so all them and is giving you free space a new space again kind of pointless as a static statistic see what I did there however it would be cool if you could log it or have an actual graphical representation of that space and whatever and top apps CPU and RAM top apps and one thing that also cam 160 wanted to do with cam is reduce its load intensity on Ram and looks like they've done that exactly that actually let's see what's being what is it it's occupying right now so we are on cam software which is here so it is still utilizing about 140 megabytes of RAM which is still quite a bit but I am running this software I'm not really doing anything with it so it's pretty much on idle and well it is open but still 100 then closed 150 megabytes of RAM it's still quite a lot ok so going through specifications here we have my my image that I've inputted earlier because I have an account online and it kind of sinks that information here we have the advanced again going back to the specification kind of showing you what you saw on this window going to Krakens this is what where things are nice and important however one major gripe I have with this well first of all you still have the performance mode in the silent mode you have the manual mode which adjusts the faint speed and this in the linear format but if you go into custom profile you can only adjust the fans well you still you can still adjust them in five percent increments but you can only adjust them up to 55 degrees Celsius on the temperature so you cannot manually adjust the CPU for the fan speed if your CPU is above 55 degrees which i think is limiting because about 55 degrees it automatically boosts the fans to 100% and my CPU right now is hovering around 50 degrees Celsius on idle so whenever I'm rendering something and my CPU goes over 60 degrees Celsius my fans automatically start to ramp up to 100% that's not okay I want to have the flexibility to have to adjust my fan speed all the way up to 100% for that extra because it's a custom profile let me do my custom profile in zxd so I just kind of leave it in silent mode which looks like here it goes up to about C that's one thing you don't have the precise measurements within percentages and that's kind of annoying but it goes up to I think this would be 70% faint speed whatever yeah 70% fan speed and liquid temperature so it looks like the sound profile gives you a little bit more of a curve to accommodate for high temperatures while reducing the fan speed then you can save the changes here here you can change the color of the hue no longer do you get that nice gradient customization but you can go here and choose the different color and actually found out that the color accuracy based on what you select in the software and based on what pops up on the actual pump is very accurate so the color that you see on the screen now is the exactly the same color that is being right now showcased on the pump you can go into alternating which will cycle between the standard and the alternating color and within the interval that is being specified up to ten seconds you can set blinking LED blinking LED is really kind of useless it just goes back and forth there's no gradient and you can also turn it off and the last thing is the settings so you can manage your account online because everything is synced up you now have an Android app where you can view all these specifications or through your smart phone going to the cam software you can actually change the image of the UI so everything that you see here right now can be changed to give you recommended dimensions for that image and maximum file size whatever change of English changing language in the interface accent color so I have it on tour because I think that complements the blue very well but you can see if I change it to green and I Save Changes you can see exactly what aspects of the UI are changed and change of color and I think that's very nice you can all start cam and start minimized in notifications this is where you can have a cam notify you with a pop-up whenever things hit the certain temperature you can disable notifications I think this is useful especially because you have the flexibility and adjusting the dials for those temperatures and overlay this is cool because now you get overlay through cam that you can disable and enable at the same time with the FPS average FPS resolution memory CPU GPU and effects effects as vsync and msaa things like that that can be enabled so they're visually on the visible on the on the screen you can change the color of the text I kept a yellow because it's the most visible right now you can change the font type you can change the font even and then scale font with resolution which is very nice and change the position of that overlay so going back into the dashboard I think what they've done here is an improvement over what was available before it is a complete UI overhaul and I like the direction they've gone now no longer though you can select for a Fahrenheit temperature something that you were able to change within the previous version of cam you can still access all the fan profiles and fan curves and especially in the custom profile I don't like how you are only able to change anything up to 55 degrees Celsius on the temperature I want to have full flexibility of that but it is what it is for now and this is cam 2.0 and NZXT really relies on feedback from the community based on all the things that are being provided and one thing that I don't know if they've addressed is multiple Krakens in your system because that would be a very big thing to fix if you have multiple Krakens on your system having a visual representation of whether or not you're modifying the fan curves for the u1u Krakens versus another crack and that would be great but for now this has been Kim 2.0 overview and it just launched today so if you if you own a crack and compatible or if you want to crack and cooler and download the software play around with it let us know what you think and leave a comment down below of what you should like to see changed or modified so thank you so much for watching this brief overview or not brief but more of a detailed overview of the software if you'd like to see more videos like this leave in the comment below thanks so much for watching and we'll see you in the next one
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