Cooler Master Nepton 140XL Cooler Review

A Closer Look at the Cooler Master Nepton 140XL

Compared to Cooler Master’s Seidon units, the Nepton has thicker 13.7mm Fluorinated ethylene propylene (FEP) tubing and a larger, more powerful pump.  The Nepton’s 140mm radiator is 38mm (1.5 inch) thick and supports 140mm as well as 120mm fan mounting on both sides. It is an aluminum radiator and the entire unit is painted black. There appears to be a fill-port beside one of the FEP tubes which understandably has a warranty void sticker on top of it, which modders would probably find interesting should they use the Nepton 140XL in their project build.

The pump block has the Cooler Master logo etched on top of it, the ring of which lights up a white LED when powered on. The pump has a 4-pin fan connector housing but has 3-pin wire connectors. This pump cable is braided and uniformly black to go with the rest of the Nepton 140XL color scheme. The FEP tubes attach at a 90 degree angle to the right side and can be angled for convenient mounting although it requires a bit of muscle as they are quite sturdy. The FEP tubing is surprisingly flexible and feels very durable that moving it around and bending during installation is not a cause of concern for kinks and damage.

The cold plate base is made of copper and the surface is rough with straight brushed machining marks running vertically. Behind this surface are ultrafine microchannels where the water flow draws heat away from the cold plate.

Unlike most self-contained coolers, the Nepton 140XL comes with a pair of fans for push-pull configuration right out of the box. These fans are based off of the new CM JetFlo fan design with some minor differences including a plastic mounting corner instead of rubber with steel threads although there are rubber pads around it to dampen vibration with the contact surface. The bundled JetFlo 140 fans also use rifle bearing instead of the polyoxymethelene (POM) bearing in the retail JetFlo fans. What is the same however is the high CFM capability of the fan design, which can produce up to 122.5 CFM at 2000 RPM.  Both fans are black and use similar JetFlo fan blade design and are powered with a braided 4-pin PWM fan connector.