 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 all new 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 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 board 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 pace with fairly good airflow. So I'm making a couple assumptions here. I'm assuming that gamers configuring their machine for gaming have a decent graphics card and I'm also assuming that gamers configuring a machine for gaming have bought themselves a decent chassis, especially if they're planning to put an H100 or an H100i into their computer. So let's go ahead and... 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 or memory change. Ah, one 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 first things first is I am going to adjust the CPU ratio and we are going to clock the CPU at like four gigahertz or something. So 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 crappier coolers that it gets compared against. And what we really need to do is we need to go and find... 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 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 degrees in this room right now, 13 degrees Celsius. 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 degrees Celsius, 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, why does it sit 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 degrees on the CPU and I want to correct to 20, then all I do is I add six and a half degrees 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. I'm going to just boot off that Vertex SSD in there that you guys can't really, there you go, now you can see it. 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 two readings and 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 Firmmark 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 sink 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 degrees 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 the factors of crappy fans that come with some of them. From my perspective, anyone spending 50, 60 bucks on a heat sink should probably be buying decent fans for it as well. Methodology-wise, I'm going to be taking the second highest core temperature in real temp GT. If there's any fluctuation, so you can see here that when you open up real temp GT, there's some movement. They kind of move around a little bit. I'll be taking the higher of the two. If this was the second highest core, I'd be taking 27, not 26. Just kind of look at it for a while. Oh, well, I saw it hit 29 for a second there. Let's see if the temperature has changed in the room though, because that's a factor. No, it's still 13 point. I'll be rounding up the room temperature as well, so rounding up to the nearest half. 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. Anyway, there you go. I'm going to take down some data here, get the idle and load for the H100 and the H100 I, and we'll see how it goes. It's torture test time now, guys. You can see we're getting up near around 60 degrees, and the GPU temperatures are still climbing. Once everything seems kind of maxed out, I'll probably give it a few more minutes here. Well, 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. This is different from how I've always tested coolers in the past, where I've always tested 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 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 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. I'll move away from it when I take my reading, but the H100i is in there now. You can see the big fat 3 1⁄8 inch tubes compared to the 1 quarter inch tubes. Corsair Link is plugged in via USB. There's no hardware button to select a medium fan profile this time around, so 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 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 square frame fan, you put it down on here and 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, 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 air can escape around the outside edges. So I'm not a big fan of that. I mean they're small, 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 because it's an awesome cooler. So I'll 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 degrees under load. So that should mean when we use air cooling heat sinks, they'll pretty much probably either well, I guess we'll find out what happens. So here we go. So we have our results. 58 degrees 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 degrees. 58 degrees, however, it is about three and a half, four 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 I really expecting, you know, some kind of huge revolution in terms of performance? No. 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. And especially with the stock firmware, they have a bit 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. Oh, another instance is already running. That's why it's not loading. There we go. Let's fire up Corsair 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 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 G-force temperature, for example. You can 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 Corsair Link, very, very, very cool stuff. You don't get it with the original H100. I think that pretty much wraps this 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 Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.