welcome guys to my comparative test between the
h100i the all new liquid cooler from Corsair and the original h100 so I have
built myself a little test bench here and I'd like to explain my methodology
I'm going to keep things pretty simple both of these coolers are going to be in
their stock configurations so that is I used the original Corsair fans for the
h100 and I'm using the allnew updated Corsair fans for the h100i remember
these are based on their static pressure series fans so they should perform
significantly better at least in terms of fans and that's not even counting
accounting for any of the improvements that have been made with the increased
diameter tubing as well as the pump and the block I don't think they've actually
made any changes to the radiator so I want to show you guys my test config
really quick there's a GTX 580 in there x79 with a
3960x I believe 3930k must be a 3930k 3930k in there got
some power supply we got a C70 case so this represents a case with fairly good
air flow so I'm making a couple assumptions here I'm assuming that you know Gamers configuring their machine
for you know gaming have a decent graphics card and I'm also assuming that
Gamers configuring machine for gaming have bought it themselves a decent
chassis especially if they're planning to put an h100 or h100i into to their
computer so let's go ahead and uh y I
wonder if this is going to work I haven't actually turned the system on
yet so there's only one way to find out for
sure and CPU memory changed ah wanted to run
setup okay so we're going to run setup and I am going to make some changes to
the configuration of this system so now
first things first is I am going to adjust the CPU ratio and we are going to
clock the CPU at like 4 gigz or something so not not very high not very
high I mean one of the things that kills me about the marketing that Corsair does
for coolers like the h100 is they give
you these numbers at stock speed on a CPU and I'm like well yeah but that
doesn't even allow it to differentiate itself from some of the some of the
crappier coolers that it gets compared against so what we really need to do is
we need to go and find aha turn our V oh
you know what let's just leave that alone okay so all we really need to do then
is turn up the CPU a little bit that's not going to affect heat much though
then we're going to go ahead and we're going to find our CPU voltage which I
can't even find and we're going to crank that baby up so we're going to actually
put some voltage into the CPU to help separate the men from the boys when it
comes to these coolers so let's go up to sort of 1.375 volts and see how this six
core processor is handled by the h100
versus the h100i now it's very cold in this room it is 13 de in this room right
now 13° C that is accurate and that is being measured at the Corsair logo at
the intake of the case so what does that mean I'm going to be correcting the
results to 20° C sort of approximately
room temperature the reason I'm doing that is because I want the results to be
somewhat comparable to what you guys will achieve at home now before you guys
sort of run and cry foul and say oh well L us it's such a cool room so you know
the results are no no no no it doesn't work that way the way it works is
whatever temperature I get if I get 60° on the CPU and I want to correct to 20
then all I do is I add 6 and2 de to my
results trust me it scales exactly linearly linearly there will be no
issues so we're going to go ahead find out how things go going to just boot off
that vertex SSD in there that you guys can't really there there you go now you
can see it uh boot off that and get into the OS and see how things go ah right
right right right okay so I'm going to do uh two readings and I'm not I'm not
going to crank these things I'm going to use them the way I would use them so on
sort of middle settings there we go just set it to Middle settings with the fans
plugged into the motherboard so we're using actually no no no no let's go
middle settings we're going Apples to Apples here so middle settings on the 100 middle settings on the 100i idle
will be at the desktop with the CPU idling and load will be running 12
instances of prime 95 on the CPU with firmar running on the GPU so that things
will heat up as much as possible I'm going to close up this case so that we get a realistic scenario as well all
right so I'm starting to take down some data here guys I'm just sort of making
some notes on my standardized heat sync test bench since I've never really had
one before methodology wise it's going to be pretty simple so besides the
corrections that I'm doing so these are my raw numbers here these are my
corrected to 20 degre numbers I'm going to make notes for which fans I'm using
I'm going to be switching to using standardized fans on all coolers rather
than using the stock ones that come with them that way we can eliminate um the
factors of you know crappy fans that come with some of them I mean from my
perspective Ive anyone spending 50 60 bucks on a heat sink should probably be
buying decent fans for it as well um methodology wise I'm going to be taking
the highest C or the second highest core temperature in real temp GT um and if
there's any fluctuation so you can see here that uh when you open up real temp
GT uh there's some some movement they kind of move around a little bit I'll be
taking the higher of the two so if this was the second highest score I'd be
taking 27 not 27 not 26 so just kind of look at it for a while and uh oh well I
saw it hit 29 for a second there let's see if the temperature changed in the
room though cuz that's a factor now it's still 13 point and I'll be rounding up
the room temperature as well so rounding up to the nearest half
so yeah you know what I think we'll probably have to go with I'll give it a
little while longer because you got to give these water coolers especially you got to give them some time for the water
to heat up that might have been just an anomaly though so anyway there we go so
I'm going to take down some data here get my idle and load for the h100 and
the H 100i and we'll see how it goes so
it's torture test time now guys you can see we're getting up near around
60° and uh the GPU temperatures are still climbing so once everything seems
kind of maxed out I'll probably give it a few more minutes here well quite yeah
I'll definitely give it a few more minutes to get maxed out then that'll
give us some idea of what our load temperature is going to be for the
system this way so this is different
from how I've always tested coolers in the past where I've always tested them
on them on an open platform now we're going with a closed case I mean a well
ventilated case mind you but a closed case and uh this should give a more
realistic representation of how it will perform in the real
world something that I've noticed already though is the fans have
automatically ramped up so it'll be interesting to see how the h100 reacts
compared to the h100i when the going gets tough
it's quite a bit louder already all right so it's gotten a little bit warmer
in the room but uh like I said we're going to correct our results so it
shouldn't really matter that much it's amazing how sensitive this thing is I'm
standing in the way and the temperature goes up a half a degree it's just crazy
so I'll move away from it when I take my reading but the h100 ey is in there now
you can see the big fat 38 inch tubes compared to the 1/4 inch tubes of course
their link is plugged in via USB there's no Hardware button to select a medium
fan profile this time around so I I'll be using the software to do that I've
updated to the latest firmware so the fans don't rattle so you can see there's
the radiator and this is something I really don't like about the uh the fans
corsairs including I mean here so you
can see that they have a rounded shape to the frame so what that means is that
around the outside of a square object like a radiator see that you don't have
a seal see with a conventional uh square
frame fan you put it down on here and you have you have a seal so you don't
have air leaking whether you're in push or pull it's an issue either way because
it means like here let's say for example it's in pull the fan cannot draw air
from anywhere other than through the fins whereas if you had gaps here here
here here here here here and here then it could draw air from around it which
would see right there see in gaps like
right there which would obviously not help draw air through the radiator so
that's a situation we're running into here where there are actually gaps where
can escape around the outside edges so I'm not a big not a big fan of that I
mean they're small but but it's all significant when we're talking about
optimizing pressure through a radiator so I've just got to go ahead and close
up the side panel then I can take my idle temps and my load temperatures I
don't know if I ever showed you guys the load temperatures with the h100 but you
know they were good which is what I've come to expect from the h100 cuz it's an
awesome cooler so we go ahead and dial that down oh got real temp running here
got my Sky Drive opened up there we go
so load temperatures were corrected to about 70° under load so that should mean
when we use air cooling heat sinks uh they'll they'll pretty much uh probably
either well I guess we'll find out what happens so here we go so we have our
results 58° on the hottest core I'd say once
again it's actually a touch louder than the original h100i so let's go ahead and close that
down go back to our
58° however it is about 3 and a half 4
degrees cooler than the original h100 so I'd say they're very similar but this
kind of stands to reason guys I mean was was I really expecting you know some
kind of huge revolution in terms of performance no uh I mean you still have
the same surface area you're still going to be limited by the fact that that's
your radiator that's your cooling surface area so we're getting what
appear to be probably better fans
because they are more pressure optimized although they do have that slight
leakage um and especially with the stock firmware they have a bit of a of a of a
rattle but don't worry once you upgrade the firmware on your h100i it's fine and
the process took like a couple minutes but the biggest benefit that you get is
Corsair link software so Corsair link
allows you to do all kinds of very cool stuff and if it would load up for me
here then I would be able to show you that go ahead and oh another instance is
our already running that's why it's not loading there we go let's fire up course
our link here it is in the background so you can do so much cool stuff so check
this out so your fans you can set all kinds of different modes and profiles
such as quiet performance custom fixed RPM default whatever else you want to do
you can group things so that you can have uh different zones in your computer
react differently you can actually rename them you can control different
kinds of pumps although this is the h100 pump so there's not a whole lot here to
be controlled you can see graphs of things like GeForce temperature for
example um you could see the h100i
temperature one h100i pump you can see all kinds of different stuff you can lay
out the console however you want you can monitor your different groups so course
our link very very very cool stuff you don't get it with the original h100 I
think that pretty much wraps us up thank you for checking out my video on the
Corsair Hydro series h100i and how it
compares to the original h100 don't forget to subscribe to L Tech tips from
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