Corsair H100 vs H100i Performance Test Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
2,449 words · ~12 min read
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welcome guys to my comparative test between the
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h100i the all new liquid cooler from Corsair and the original h100 so I have
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built myself a little test bench here and I'd like to explain my methodology
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I'm going to keep things pretty simple both of these coolers are going to be in
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their stock configurations so that is I used the original Corsair fans for the
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h100 and I'm using the allnew updated Corsair fans for the h100i remember
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these are based on their static pressure series fans so they should perform
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significantly better at least in terms of fans and that's not even counting
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accounting for any of the improvements that have been made with the increased
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diameter tubing as well as the pump and the block I don't think they've actually
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made any changes to the radiator so I want to show you guys my test config
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really quick there's a GTX 580 in there x79 with a
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3960x I believe 3930k must be a 3930k 3930k in there got
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some power supply we got a C70 case so this represents a case with fairly good
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air flow so I'm making a couple assumptions here I'm assuming that you know Gamers configuring their machine
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for you know gaming have a decent graphics card and I'm also assuming that
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Gamers configuring machine for gaming have bought it themselves a decent
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chassis especially if they're planning to put an h100 or h100i into to their
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computer so let's go ahead and uh y I
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wonder if this is going to work I haven't actually turned the system on
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yet so there's only one way to find out for
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sure and CPU memory changed ah wanted to run
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setup okay so we're going to run setup and I am going to make some changes to
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the configuration of this system so now
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first things first is I am going to adjust the CPU ratio and we are going to
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clock the CPU at like 4 gigz or something so not not very high not very
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high I mean one of the things that kills me about the marketing that Corsair does
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for coolers like the h100 is they give
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you these numbers at stock speed on a CPU and I'm like well yeah but that
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doesn't even allow it to differentiate itself from some of the some of the
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crappier coolers that it gets compared against so what we really need to do is
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we need to go and find aha turn our V oh
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you know what let's just leave that alone okay so all we really need to do then
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is turn up the CPU a little bit that's not going to affect heat much though
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then we're going to go ahead and we're going to find our CPU voltage which I
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can't even find and we're going to crank that baby up so we're going to actually
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put some voltage into the CPU to help separate the men from the boys when it
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comes to these coolers so let's go up to sort of 1.375 volts and see how this six
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core processor is handled by the h100
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versus the h100i now it's very cold in this room it is 13 de in this room right
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now 13° C that is accurate and that is being measured at the Corsair logo at
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the intake of the case so what does that mean I'm going to be correcting the
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results to 20° C sort of approximately
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room temperature the reason I'm doing that is because I want the results to be
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somewhat comparable to what you guys will achieve at home now before you guys
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sort of run and cry foul and say oh well L us it's such a cool room so you know
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the results are no no no no it doesn't work that way the way it works is
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whatever temperature I get if I get 60° on the CPU and I want to correct to 20
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then all I do is I add 6 and2 de to my
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results trust me it scales exactly linearly linearly there will be no
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issues so we're going to go ahead find out how things go going to just boot off
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that vertex SSD in there that you guys can't really there there you go now you
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can see it uh boot off that and get into the OS and see how things go ah right
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right right right okay so I'm going to do uh two readings and I'm not I'm not
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going to crank these things I'm going to use them the way I would use them so on
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sort of middle settings there we go just set it to Middle settings with the fans
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plugged into the motherboard so we're using actually no no no no let's go
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middle settings we're going Apples to Apples here so middle settings on the 100 middle settings on the 100i idle
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will be at the desktop with the CPU idling and load will be running 12
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instances of prime 95 on the CPU with firmar running on the GPU so that things
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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
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right so I'm starting to take down some data here guys I'm just sort of making
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some notes on my standardized heat sync test bench since I've never really had
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one before methodology wise it's going to be pretty simple so besides the
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corrections that I'm doing so these are my raw numbers here these are my
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corrected to 20 degre numbers I'm going to make notes for which fans I'm using
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I'm going to be switching to using standardized fans on all coolers rather
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than using the stock ones that come with them that way we can eliminate um the
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factors of you know crappy fans that come with some of them I mean from my
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perspective Ive anyone spending 50 60 bucks on a heat sink should probably be
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buying decent fans for it as well um methodology wise I'm going to be taking
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the highest C or the second highest core temperature in real temp GT um and if
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there's any fluctuation so you can see here that uh when you open up real temp
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GT uh there's some some movement they kind of move around a little bit I'll be
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taking the higher of the two so if this was the second highest score I'd be
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taking 27 not 27 not 26 so just kind of look at it for a while and uh oh well I
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saw it hit 29 for a second there let's see if the temperature changed in the
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room though cuz that's a factor now it's still 13 point and I'll be rounding up
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the room temperature as well so rounding up to the nearest half
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so yeah you know what I think we'll probably have to go with I'll give it a
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little while longer because you got to give these water coolers especially you got to give them some time for the water
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to heat up that might have been just an anomaly though so anyway there we go so
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I'm going to take down some data here get my idle and load for the h100 and
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the H 100i and we'll see how it goes so
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it's torture test time now guys you can see we're getting up near around
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60° and uh the GPU temperatures are still climbing so once everything seems
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kind of maxed out I'll probably give it a few more minutes here well quite yeah
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I'll definitely give it a few more minutes to get maxed out then that'll
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give us some idea of what our load temperature is going to be for the
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system this way so this is different
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from how I've always tested coolers in the past where I've always tested them
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on them on an open platform now we're going with a closed case I mean a well
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ventilated case mind you but a closed case and uh this should give a more
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realistic representation of how it will perform in the real
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world something that I've noticed already though is the fans have
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automatically ramped up so it'll be interesting to see how the h100 reacts
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compared to the h100i when the going gets tough
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it's quite a bit louder already all right so it's gotten a little bit warmer
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in the room but uh like I said we're going to correct our results so it
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shouldn't really matter that much it's amazing how sensitive this thing is I'm
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standing in the way and the temperature goes up a half a degree it's just crazy
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so I'll move away from it when I take my reading but the h100 ey is in there now
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you can see the big fat 38 inch tubes compared to the 1/4 inch tubes of course
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their link is plugged in via USB there's no Hardware button to select a medium
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fan profile this time around so I I'll be using the software to do that I've
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updated to the latest firmware so the fans don't rattle so you can see there's
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the radiator and this is something I really don't like about the uh the fans
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corsairs including I mean here so you
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can see that they have a rounded shape to the frame so what that means is that
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around the outside of a square object like a radiator see that you don't have
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a seal see with a conventional uh square
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frame fan you put it down on here and you have you have a seal so you don't
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have air leaking whether you're in push or pull it's an issue either way because
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it means like here let's say for example it's in pull the fan cannot draw air
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from anywhere other than through the fins whereas if you had gaps here here
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here here here here here and here then it could draw air from around it which
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would see right there see in gaps like
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right there which would obviously not help draw air through the radiator so
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that's a situation we're running into here where there are actually gaps where
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can escape around the outside edges so I'm not a big not a big fan of that I
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mean they're small but but it's all significant when we're talking about
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optimizing pressure through a radiator so I've just got to go ahead and close
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up the side panel then I can take my idle temps and my load temperatures I
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don't know if I ever showed you guys the load temperatures with the h100 but you
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know they were good which is what I've come to expect from the h100 cuz it's an
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awesome cooler so we go ahead and dial that down oh got real temp running here
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got my Sky Drive opened up there we go
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so load temperatures were corrected to about 70° under load so that should mean
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when we use air cooling heat sinks uh they'll they'll pretty much uh probably
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either well I guess we'll find out what happens so here we go so we have our
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results 58° on the hottest core I'd say once
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again it's actually a touch louder than the original h100i so let's go ahead and close that
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down go back to our
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58° however it is about 3 and a half 4
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degrees cooler than the original h100 so I'd say they're very similar but this
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kind of stands to reason guys I mean was was I really expecting you know some
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kind of huge revolution in terms of performance no uh I mean you still have
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the same surface area you're still going to be limited by the fact that that's
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your radiator that's your cooling surface area so we're getting what
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appear to be probably better fans
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because they are more pressure optimized although they do have that slight
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leakage um and especially with the stock firmware they have a bit of a of a of a
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rattle but don't worry once you upgrade the firmware on your h100i it's fine and
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the process took like a couple minutes but the biggest benefit that you get is
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Corsair link software so Corsair link
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allows you to do all kinds of very cool stuff and if it would load up for me
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here then I would be able to show you that go ahead and oh another instance is
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our already running that's why it's not loading there we go let's fire up course
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our link here it is in the background so you can do so much cool stuff so check
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this out so your fans you can set all kinds of different modes and profiles
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such as quiet performance custom fixed RPM default whatever else you want to do
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you can group things so that you can have uh different zones in your computer
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react differently you can actually rename them you can control different
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kinds of pumps although this is the h100 pump so there's not a whole lot here to
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be controlled you can see graphs of things like GeForce temperature for
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example um you could see the h100i
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temperature one h100i pump you can see all kinds of different stuff you can lay
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out the console however you want you can monitor your different groups so course
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our link very very very cool stuff you don't get it with the original h100 I
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think that pretty much wraps us up thank you for checking out my video on the
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Corsair Hydro series h100i and how it
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compares to the original h100 don't forget to subscribe to L Tech tips from
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