Performance

With the Nepton 204M installed in our test bench I was finally able to get to testing. To do this we run through two different benchmarks. One is Prime95, this benchmark puts the CPU under more load than you should ever see in day to day use. The second test is running through the combined test on 3DMark 11 on loop. This way we are loading both the CPU and GPU to see what a more real world situation will put out for heat. With both tests I document both the CPU and RAM temps because in configurations heatsinks do a better job cooling RAM as well. Along with that testing I also document the noise levels to see how quiet everything runs.

It wasn’t really a big shock when the Nepton 240M out performed everything else we have tested in the past including the other 240mm water cooling kit from Cooler Master. On the ram side of things peak temperature testing did show that the Nepton 240M had a little room for improvement but really that is more specific to where the water cooling is installed in our test bench than anything else. The Be Quiet heatsink that performs best on that test does blow down on the ram were the Nepton 240M blows across the motherboard in our configuration.

Noise testing was a little less impressive but for full disclosure with this being the first time I had performed these tests in the LanOC office (previously they were done by our old cooling reviewer remotely) it is very possible that I didn’t have the decibel reader in the same location as before. This is important because even just a few inches can change the readout by a large amount. Because of that I’m inclined to ignore this result until I do father testing and retesting on other heatsinks.