Cooler Master Nepton 280L AIO CPU Cooler Review

Cooler Master Nepton 280L Final Thoughts and Conclusion

With so many water coolers on the market, it’s tough to find ways to innovate. Cooler Master has taken the best of their technology and combined it into the Nepton 280L, to provide us with a fairly priced high performance all-in-one liquid CPU cooler.

The Nepton 280L brings us high performance JetFlo 140 fans to cool this monsterous 280mm radiator, plus includes FEP tubing to provide a highly flexible installation inside your case. This FEP tubing may look a little cheap at first, but it when you realize that it’s better at combating evaporation and kinks, that you know it’s the best choice.

Installation of the Nepton 280L was made very easy with the hardware provided. I was impressed that even the fans had thumb screws to get those going, but ultimately you’ll end up needing a screw driver to fully seat them. The only gripe I had with the hardware was on the water block hardware – the thumb screws were small and had a Standard screwdriver slot instead of a Phillips head. With this combination at hand, it made getting a precise fitment a little difficult, but not impossible.

The initial MSRP of the Nepton 280L was $139.99, but you can find it today for $119.99 on Amazon, or even on rebate from Newegg for $99.99 (after $20 rebate). This makes the 280L aggressively priced, considering its target audience, and makes it incredibly affordable.

When you get to firing up this cooler, you can’t help but notice that the fans are going to be noisy. At low speeds they’re very tolerable, but when you put a load on your CPU and the fans ramp up, they’re fairly loud. You should be able to easily forget about them if you throw on a quality noise cancelling headset while playing your favorite game, and they’re not so loud that you can’t have a conversation with someone else in the room.

Performance wise, this cooler did nothing but impress. It was both a solid performer with low and high stress, including an overclock. This cooler had a ton more headroom if I ever wanted to overclock my 4770k any further.

Overall this cooler is a solid performer and should be high on your list of choices!

Legit Bottom Line: Cooler Master did a great job with the Nepton 280L, including high performance fans and all, and it performed very well. Price per performance, this cooler is definitely a winner!