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Corsair H150i Review: The First Gen6 Asetek Pump

2018-01-08
they've done it a Sutekh has actually made something new the haisa tech Gen six pump and cooling solution is now coming out and it's going first to Corsair who have a new h1 50 I Pro this one right here three hundred sixty millimeter radiator with the Gen six pump and also an H 115 I Pro in these same two hundred eighty millimeter family as before just with the new pump and new fans today we're going to be reviewing the H 150 I just before CES as well so after CES we're planning to do a teardown of at least one of them stay tuned for that but for now we can get through the review before that this video is brought to you by Leon Lee and their 550 x and 330 cases the 550 X is a $180 mid tower case with tempered glass on all panels it's got three RGB LED fans positioned in the front each of which has a metal frame housing and an open interior design if you prefer a cheaper option the 330 is $100 and comes without fans and as what we recommended most heavily in one of our recent case reviews learn more at the link in the description below for the absolute basics the coolers are 360 millimeters to the H 150 I and 280 millimeters for the 115 I both are demarcating with a pro suffix the coolers also come with Maglev fans without the RGB LEDs or any LEDs at all so a bit cheaper than the normal magnetic levitation fans and other than that the focus is primarily on silence there are not a whole lot of changes to the ASA tech cooling solution outright most of the changes involve customizations to the PCB inside that controls the LEDs for instance there's another change in the cold plate it's a couple millimeters smaller than the old cold plate which is the first change to a cold plate that ASA tech has done in years more than I can remember at this point so that's a somewhat major change for them making the cold plate smaller they also made the pump housing smaller the block itself which means that really aside from visual changes maybe you'll have fewer clearance concerns although those were no for that much of a concern to begin with the mounting mechanism is slightly changed mostly for the better now instead of having multiple drilled through holes for Intel plates it's just got the sliding set up so you can accommodate basically any size and strictly from a modding standpoint as we do all of those hybrid mods for example it makes sense that this kind of bracket solution would be better because you can accommodate things that it's not meant to accommodate like video cards so that's a small change that's not as significant as some of the others like the ml fan inclusion tubes are coming out of the side now so it's back to the way it was in Gen 4 instead of coming out of the top and Gen 5 for Corsair coolers and they're mounted to 90 degree elbow Achatz the fans can spin down to zero rpm when they do so they will slave to the liquid temperature rather than CPU temperature for instance and so following liquid temperature they will spin up at 45 degrees Celsius which is something we'll talk about more at the end of the video besides all these the prices the H 150 I Pro is a hundred and seventy dollars making it one of the most expensive closed-loop liquid coolers on the market and the H 115 I Pro is a little bit cheaper than that comes in at $140 the 280 millimeter solution most of the marketing for these focuses on noise so we'll be focusing on noise normalized performance for the most part meaning that we are normalizing the noise level of all the coolers we have on that particular chart for 40 decibels that is system noise in a room with a 26 DBA noise floor so of course the noise levels are always going to be a bit different than what the manufacturer reports because they're measuring probably in an anechoic chamber or something similar to that so we're targeting 40 DBA for noise normalization and then we'll have the flat out performance as well let's get into that for test methodology as always you can check the link in the description below for the article that'll tell you how we tested it and give you a written summary of what we're about to go through let's start our thermals with flat out performance and then move on to noise normalized performance testing our focus here is fans and set machspeed though we do have lower rpm numbers present we'll give it a noise normalize test more focus in a moment for now we're seeing the corsair h 150 i right around levels of the h 115 IV - not the new one at 1500 rpm or the ice bear 420 with the high rpm EVGA fans rather than the stock ones keep in mind that test variance places everything within the thirty four point five to thirty six point five degree range as functionally equal surrounding the H 150 I Pro also keep in mind that appreciable differences are lacking at this point as it's rare to gain significantly from an extra one or two degrees reduction in temperatures GPUs are perhaps the primary exception to this particularly in high overclock scenarios regardless the coarser h 150 i maintains an average idle temperature and sits toward the upper quarter of coolers because the h 150 i focus is more on operating quietly thermal performance isn't a leader until normalizing for other coolers most of the thermal performance you're seen thus far can be attributed to limited thermal gains generationally in the asa tech solution with Corsairs medium speed fans contributing to the rest of the performance differential setting the pump to quiet mode by the way results in significantly warmer temperatures aged 150 i moves down to forty nine point nine degrees celsius over ambient for load temperature or twelve degrees for idle this is an increase of fourteen degrees from the high speed pump and is repeatable in testing to be fair though quiet does significantly reduce pump speed the reported rate falls from 2800 RPM to around 1100 RPM looking at noise normalized performance at 40 DBA the corsair cooler is able to leverage its larger 360 millimeter radiator size keeping temperatures to about thirty six point eight degrees over ambient load this also lands course earning the top of the charts here and it's within margin of error of our ex 62 and celsius as 36 measurements these units are all functionally equal in our testing coarser is able to spin down to a zero rpm operating mode giving it bit of an upper hand here if no load is on the system it can spin down to zero and sustain idle or simple browser like processing without spinning up at least until liquid hits 45 for full system noise with passively cold components other than the CPU and a noise floor of 26 DBA the corsair unit measured out at around 43 DBA on our meter the only other thing on the system making noise is a 23% blower fan from 98 Ti which makes basically zero noise at least until the low end of cooler rpms this cooler is one of the quietest when operating at its maximum speed while still retaining some of its thermal performance it's certainly not the most impressive cooler on the bench particularly in price the performance value but it's a mid pack competitor that performs average thermally for its size or above average for noise the pump is responsible for making a good deal of that noise by the way and more sensitive users will likely want to operate on either balanced or quiet profiles the full speed profile makes a noticeable and audible ticking just like some of the older ASA tech pumps this will be somewhat obfuscated by cases but not entirely it just depends on how sensitive you are to that specific type of noise it is possible of course that other system fans could spin up to a point where the pump noise becomes inaudible the technology underneath the cooler hasn't changed all that much it's mostly led changes and then some small changes like returning the tubes to be 90-degree right angle brackets off the side of the pump housing other than that you've got a slight cold plate size difference some new LEDs new fans go into the ML series instead which is definitely one of the benefits on the noise front for Corsair but they are kind of weak when it comes to flat-out performance but to be fair their target isn't flat-out performance its silenced so that's what they're going for here other items of note you'll get about a two degree improvement with manual spread of thermal paste on an X 99 sized platform so when we did our testing we used a static thermal paste versus a Sutekh thermal paste when it was applied in the sort of half dollar size amount on the cold blade and we did see performance uplift by shifting over to the way we do all of our testing which is manually spreading the thermal compound so there's a bit of a performance gain there it doesn't cover the entire IHS of larger CPUs and you could benefit a bit it'll still operate perfectly fine without manual spread but it's something to keep in mind so your RPM mode waiting for 45-degree liquid temperatures is a bit interesting because part of the whole deal with this cooler when we were speaking with Coursera days attack at Computex last year now was that the Gen six pump is supposed to hopefully be stepping away from leaning entirely on liquid temperature and lean instead a bit more on CPU temperature for example so liquid temperatures a bit funny depending on how good the CPU is at transferring its heat to the liquid cooler the liquid temperature could be quite low compared to the temperature of the CPU a great example of this would be a 7700 K overclocked where you could easily get into the 90s Celsius for your core temperature and liquid temperature on an X 60 to 280 millimeter cooler with max fan speeds would be sitting at low 30s so big differential there and of course if you turn the fans off completely liquid temperature will increase we've seen it and you never want to exceed 60 on these ASA tech coolers so 45 is a good point to toggle on for the Corsair unit it's just a question of does it turn on when you need it to and for the most part the answer is yes it's just going to depend partially on the CPU that you're using because the transfer between the die to the IHS to the cooler can have some latency with regard to the thermal interface between all of those so it might be a bit latent on spending backup but you're not gonna lose that much you might like maybe start getting into the 90s and if you're overclocking you shouldn't be using a zero rpm solution anyway so these are all the things are considered overall as a product the H 150 I pro is priced towards the top of the market it's right up there with the crack in X 62 X 62 is has been one of the most expensive sometimes almost it's just not really in a worthy way it's helped that price for far too long in the 150-160 range so this comes in above that it's a bit bigger it has different RGB LED options if you prefer these and that's really the primary difference other than the size which is the biggest driver but the thermal performance is not all that different it just comes down to what can you fit in your case and of course if you put aftermarket fans on them that changes a bit because you've got 360 versus 280 so it's not bad in terms of value proposition it's just expensive which is fair the H 115 I Pro is much more palatable at $140 that's around where the EVGA CLC 280 originally shipped I think that was 130 and the H 115 I non-pro used to be about 130 ish as well so 140 seems fair for the H 115 I Pro though we don't have numbers for it today so the pricing there seems definitely a bit more palatable than though 150 I Pro this one's not bad it's just you really have to want that corsair brand the pump plate and RGB LEDs on it and then the rest is all the size of the radiator basically and there's valid reasons to want that radiator size so we'll leave that up to you the product itself we have not found any significant flaws with it at this time so nothing really to complain about in a big way there that's always a good thing we will be taking it apart to look at the gen 6 cooler and see what else has changed but other than that I think that pretty much wraps it up so you find links for the article review in the description below alongside links to the product whenever it goes up for sale if you're interested in checking it out further subscribe for more go to patreon.com/scishow sexist topics that directly or stored on cameras nexus net to pick up a mod mat like this one you're watching I'll see you all next time
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