Gadgetory

the Kraken g10 is probably the third time that NZXT has really blown me away with an inexpensive product that just makes the lives of system builders easier so the first one was their little USB internal header hub that allowed you to add additional headers if you didn't have enough on your motherboard this was back in the days when most boards had like two or even one internal header the second one was the grid which is a little fan power hub that allows you to simplify your cable management and simplify your fan speed management and the third is this what this does is it takes your existing there's many of them on the market asa tech based liquid cooler a cpu liquid cooler and allows you to mount it to your graphics card effectively water cooling your video card but at a fraction of the cost of what it would what it would cost you to go with a full custom liquid cooling solution for your card which is really the only other option out there for a video card water cooling inside the excellent but completely unnecessary soft closed cell foam packaging I mean none of the stuff is a fragile or anything we find the bracket itself which is available in black white and red we find a backplate that has a variety of different mounting holes we also find a variety of mounting hardware to go through it we find a 92 millimeter fan which actually just screws on to the bracket itself and then blows air directly at the back of the video card where the vrm and actually some of the memory typically are in order to make sure that the card doesn't run overly warm and finally we find an instruction manual with some included zip ties this is a nice touch just because you know cable management is never a bad thing so why would you want to liquid cool your graphics card well number one is it gives you something to do with your you know your old ace attack CPU liquid cooler that you're not using anymore because frankly they're just not that great for CPU cooling CPUs kick out a lot more heat than GPUs overall number two is the fact that GPUs genuinely perform better if you're able to keep them running cooler GPU boost 2.0 and AMD's latest power tune will actually turn up the frequency of your graphics card higher if you are able to keep it cooler now the only things to watch out for here are things like k scan Pat ability you're going to have to have positions in the case for fan mounts that are either 120 millimeter 90 millimeter like the H 90 from Corsair as well as the kraken X 40 from NZXT and you're going to have to have ample tubing lengths to reach your graphics card the last thing to watch out for is that just because a fan fits somewhere doesn't mean that you're actually going to be able to screw a radiator in there sometimes screwdriver clearance is going to be more of an issue for you than the actual fan clearance so NZXT has some compatibility charts for cases a lot of their cases are compatible with it so go check that out the other thing that they have compatibility lists for is coolers now you'd expect NZXT to just say oh well it's compatible with the crack in this and the crack in that no they're not they're coming out they're saying look here's all the coolers from all the brands that will work with our product go nuts use someone else's cooler with that and I think that's very cool of them and then card compatibility is being updated constantly but it's compatible with like the latest stuff because of its very modular design so gtx 780 780ti titan 292 90 x all of these are supported you can check out NZXT site for some you know updates in the future about that so without further ado let's get this baby installed in something we're going to take a crack at the Radeon r9 290 and see how much better it can perform with our normal standard overclock so just letting it ramp up as high as it can with better cooling versus the stock cooler installing the g10 really wasn't that bad it's pretty daunting when you first look at it because it's very new and when I first started strapping it to the card I was kind of getting frustrated but when I stopped trying to align the words properly due to my OCD I found it actually to be fairly easy if you there's there's a specific way you're supposed to have the tubes going they're supposed to be kind of aligned near the top of the card so they can be routed more easily and I was trying to have them turn towards the fan which doesn't really work just because of how the name would have been aligned up performance wise the graphs pretty much say it all we saw this coming with an R 90 to 90 we knew that water cooling it would help a lot because it got so freakin hot so once we strap a water cooler on it like we just did we knew we would see improvements like this but it's still kind of surprising to see how much it improved I can tell you right now even though it's not on the graph our 780 benchmarks which used to be above the r9 290 are now below once it's water-cooled although that's not entirely fair because the 780 isn't water-cooled itself well we're back to me you guys here we're going to cheat a little bit we unfortunately didn't have time to install it in an actual case so we just ran it on the test bench but if you want to see what it looks like in a case here's some footage of the last time we were in NZXT suite and we were actually checking this out with not one but two cracking G tens installed in a single chassis so yes guys it is SLI and crossfire compatible as long as you have adequate spacing between your PCI Express slots and you don't need a ton of additional expansion cards so what is there left to say about it well it makes your graphics card perform better whether you're overclocking or not in many cases because stuff like the r9 290x and the r9 290 actually throttle a fair bit even at stock speeds it makes your graphics card run cooler which will lead to better life and it's relatively inexpensive especially if you have an older liquid cooling unit just kind of lying around already even a 120 millimeter liquid cooler although I prefer 140 millimeter is going to be more than adequate for cooling something like a GPU so this is a fantastic product at a low price and I think it's fantastic thank you for checking out this video like it if you liked it dislike it if you just liked it leave a comment if you have feelings that just can't be expressed by thumbs up or thumbs down and finally don't forget to subscribe