Cooler Master Nepton 120XL Review

Cooler Master kindly sent over their Nepton 120XL CPU cooler to take a look at, and I have to say, I’m impressed. It, to be clear is a thick radiatiored 120mm All-In-One watercooling unit, and brags about being ‘maintenance free’. The whole idea here is to get the benefit of water cooler – i.e quiet and high performance, while not needing lots of knowledge on building custom loops, but does mean you aren’t going to be expanding this loop in any way, it is purely designed to cool your CPU, and that’s it. But, for the current Amazon price of just over £60, this thing is great, and I don’t mind that it’s a CPU only option.

Inside the box you’ll find two 120mm Cooler Master fans designed for High Static air pressure to put through the radiator, a bag of fittings, the cooler itself and a pretty decent install guide. The cooler can fit on anything from Intel 2011-3, Intel 1150/1155 to AMD AM3+ or even FM1 (if you are a nut case and think that any FM1 chip needs a beastly cooler like this…)! All the mounting hardware, besides a screw driver, is all included in the bag, for all the sockets it supports, and the very clear, detailed and easy to understand install guide (which, if you take a second and look at it, it, it isn’t even needed because the install is very simple), which even clearly tells you which socket the diagram is for – very nice cooler master.

The fans provided are 120mm, 4 pin PWM fans which I really like. They are designed for Static air flow to push air through the radiator, and with the PWM function, the PC can automatically vary the speed of the fans to suit the temperature. The radiator is a 35mm thick, 120mm rad with fairly big end-caps that act as the res for the system, and on the tup end cap, there is a fill port, although removing the cap will void the warranty, and is not necessary as the system is ‘maintenance free’ and will likely still work long after it is obsolete!