Corsair H105 Liquid Cooler
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
1,496 words · ~7 min read
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Corsair Raptor K40 keyboard and M45 Mouse are designed to provide
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best-in-class features and performance for gaming click now to learn more when
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it comes to CPU liquid coolers it's not exactly rocket surgery it's mostly a
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function of how good are the fans and how much surface area can you throw at
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it I mean there can be other factors for example with Corsair's h100i there's
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excellent software integration with their Corsair links software for things
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like monitoring liquid temperature uh monitoring fan RPM CPU temperature fan
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control all that kind of cool stuff but those things tend to add cost to the
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unit and tend not to necessarily contribute to Raw performance the h105
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goes to the h110 school of product design which is a little bit more
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barebones in terms of extra stuff but definitely targeting performance so
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unlike the h100i the h105 features a
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thicker radiator and unlike the h110
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which features a thin radiator but with 140 millimeter fans the h105
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features 120 mm fans on its red so it
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should sit somewhere in between those two in terms of performance but if I had
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to Hazard to guess I would say particularly at lower RPMs it's probably
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going to be closer to the h110 because of the design of the
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radiator with a little bit uh lower fin density than I'm used to seeing with
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these all-in-one units which I think is actually probably a good thing because
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as soon as you throw dual 120 mm fans at
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cooling a single CPU even if it's quite a powerful one unless you're talking
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about extreme overclocking it's pretty much enough so you might as well go
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after silence and speaking of Silence the two included fans are pwm so this is
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a bit of a nice touch here and they can operate from anywhere from 800 RPM to
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2700 RPM so 800 RPM is going to be very
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very quiet on a 38 mm thick radiator like this one that's compared to 25 mm
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which is more the more typical thin thin radiator setup like what you'll find on
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an h100i and then all the way up to 2700
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RPM which for me would be uncomfortably loud and I probably wouldn't recommend
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that so much now the included fans aside from being pwm and being good in that
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way are pretty basic these are sp120 L
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fans unlike the regular sp1 120s which
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are available in a quiet Edition and performance Edition the meain the main
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differen is there being that the sp1 120s have swappable color rings as well
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as rubber isolating grommets in the corners and just generally feel a little
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bit nicer overall in terms of build quality now if you did decide that you
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weren't going to use the L Series fans and you were going to upgrade to SPS
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there's another little cool thing so Corsair has changed the design of the
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block and pump combo unit here they've add they've changed the ID and they've
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added a little swappable ring so it comes with the same colors as you can
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get in af and SP series fans you got blue and red but unfortunately not white
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so there's a gray one on there by default they've also updated the mounting hardware Just a Touch so it
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comes with the Intel hold down pre-installed now it comes with a
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slightly updated back plate this is an acitech design so it's um not really
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something we've never seen before but the little pieces are a little bit
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easier to slide so whether you're mounting on LGA 115x 1366 or 2011 you're
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going to be able to get it in the right position quite easily although remember
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guys 2011 does have its own back plate built onto the motherboard just like AMD
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sockets so same thing for the AMD Hardware you're just going to get a hold
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down which can be swapped by just undoing these four little Clips right
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here popping off the bottom ring just like that pulling off the retention or
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pulling off the hold down and then swapping on the appropriate AMD one so
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you can do that relatively easily and then it'll just screw directly into the
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back plate that is built into your motherboard giving you compatibility for
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FM sockets as well as am sockets the
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last thing they've updated in terms of the ID is they have changed the thumb a
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little bit and then other than that I think that's pretty much it for accessories you also get a pwm y cable
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so this will allow you to plug both of the fans into your CPU fan header so you
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can actually control both of them with pwm using a single fan header so that's
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actually really handy that's from what I've seen the best way to do pwm control
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because the CPU fan header tends to be the least broken of all the pwm
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implementations on a on a given motherboard or in a given system it uses
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quarter inch tubing but I'm not really convinced that that's going to be a
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problem for it because these all-in-one liquid coolers don't tend to to have
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extremely high flow rates to the point where 38 or even halfin tubing would
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make much of a difference and other than that it's going to come down to the
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radiator right here so 38 mm thick as I mentioned before a little bit lower fin
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density than we've necessarily seen in the past and uh and the and well the
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thickness well okay I've talked a lot about the thickness it's because that's the main difference here it's going to
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affect performance and it's also going to affect compatibility so you're going
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to want to make sure that if you plan to install the h105 in your case you have
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enough clearance not only for a 25mm thick fan but also a 38 mm thick
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radiator it comes with all the mounting hardware that you'll need to mount the fans on either side mount the radiator
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directly to the case and then the fans to that or Mount the radiator through
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the fan to the case from the top or whatever else you need to do you just
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need to make sure you have enough room which leads us to Performance off to luk
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for that all right so to start us off there's been a test bench change now we
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are running an x79 deluxe from ASUS and a 4820k from Intel this was because in
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the previous setup I was noticing some pretty major inconsistencies when trying
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to test the h105 from Corsair and it wasn't testing the same every run and it
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was kind of all over the place with massive Deltas so I thought there might
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be something wrong swapped out hardware and now we're getting much more consistent numbers this was isolated to
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just this test um so it must have been recently and I don't think it's going to
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affect other videos that we've recorded so don't worry about that as for
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installing it it was much better than h110 which has the kind of older
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installation setup but it wasn't quite as good as an h100i which has the super
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nice Magnetic Locking plates and all that kind of stuff that Corsair's put on
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it but it was definitely in the higher Echelon of uh installation processes for
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coolers that I have used and it performed pretty much exactly where we
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expected it performed in between an h100i and an h110 now what I want in the
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future as all of those things are fairly self-explanatory and you guys probably heard that from lonus previously because
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he expected it and it was true um what what I want to see in the future is I
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want them all to come together I want like essentially an
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h15 i or an H awesome I or something I
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don't really know but I want them all to come together I want the the size of the
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h110 I want the thickness of the h105 and I want the Advanced Technologies and
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connectivity and mounting system of an h100i what do you guys want what what do
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you looking for in a cooler are you even looking for an AIO or are you more
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focused still on air uh let me know in the comments below like and favorite the
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video depending on whether you run air or water and as always subscribe to
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Lin's Tech tips
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oh