The world of all-in-one liquid cooling is already populated enough as is, so when we see a new unit come along we sometimes find it difficult to get excited. Still, one problem that seems to persist is that a lot of these all-in-one units don't live up to their promise of being quiet, so when Cooler Master came along today and announced the Nepton 120XL and the Nepton 240M, we had to have a look at the spec sheet before we could consider it interesting.
The in-house developed pumps of the Seidon all-in-one units from Cooler Master responded very well to adjusting their speed through voltage regulation, but the fans were noisy. While you could, of course, replace them yourself, that does add cost.
With the new Nepton coolers, Cooler Master promises a quiet pump and silent fans. The pump resides right above the copper cold plate, and it's powered by a 3-pin fan connector. It is rated to pull about 4.8 W, making it rather powerful, yet it should make less than 15 dBA of noise when running at full speed.
Although Cooler Master might not want us to, there's really no reason to run the pump at full speed all the time, and if it responds to voltage regulation as well as the older Seidon units did, that can be a very effective way to silence it even more. (Just make sure that it is actually spinning when you reduce its operating voltage.)
The fans on the Neptons are also different than those on the Seidon units, having just five blades with a high-pressure design. They can spin between 800 and 2400 RPM, pushing between 16.5 to 76 CFM and making between 6.5 and 27 dBA of noise.
As far as appearances go, the Nepton series are fairly unremarkable. The tubing is made of FEP, which is very robust and prevents evaporation, but it doesn't look especially pretty. The pump unit does have an LED-lit Cooler Master logo, though, and the fans are certainly unique.
Considering the powerful pump and fans, the Cooler Master Neptons are certainly capable of cooling with a lot of oomph if you run everything at full speed, at the cost of noise. With the right fine-tuning, though, you can probably get them to operate very silently, which somehow is not something we see often in the all-in-one water cooling world.
There's no word on pricing yet, although we expect both the Nepton 120XL and the Nepton 240M to be priced below $100. Cooler Master ships the units with a five-year warranty.
Follow Niels Broekhuijsen @NBroekhuijsen. Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.
