Gadgetory

hey everyone this is Steve from gamers Nexus dotnet and today we're going to round up four new ish liquid coolers closed-loop liquid coolers excuse me or CLC's and those four coolers for today will be Corsairs 280 millimeter hydro series h 110 CLC and 140 millimeter H 90 CLC against NZXT s 280 millimeter X 60 and 140 millimeter X 40 models and all four of these units are supplied by ace tech who is a liquid cooler engineer and supplier and they engineer the radiator the pump and the tubing so really for this reason all for use identical mounting mechanisms and perform relatively similarly in terms of thermals although you will see that there is quite a large difference and one aspect and a little bit let's first talk about the hard specs for each cooler and then jump into objective thermal performance data and my opinions so starting with the smaller units here's what we're looking at the the small units are in this in this case the H 90 and kraken x 40 by coarser and NZXT respectively the corsair hydra series h 90 and the x 40 are both 140 millimeter radiator units so they are larger than the until now standard size 120 millimeter radiators and both ship with one fan but can be equipped with two which i tested and we'll talk about that in a moment and both of them use the same copper cold plate design by a stack same radiator by a stack all of that same tubing although the NZXT units do have longer tubing in this case i don't have it in front of me right now i think it's 16 inches which is slightly longer than the corsair units and as for the larger coolers we're looking at coursers h 110 and NZXT scratchin x 60 both of which are 280 millimeter radiators so radiators wow that was a whole jumble of letters and that's pretty huge I don't need to tell most of you that so very few cases support these right now a Corsair and NZXT of course to make most of them that support this sized radiator and they do utilize a dual fan cooling design to 140 millimeter fans and can be mounted with two additional fans for a total of or in a push-pull configuration and all four coolers are compatible with all modern socket types including Intel's LGA 1155 1156 1366 and 2011 sockets the AMD socket compatibility includes a.m. 2 a.m. 2 + + 3 + a.m. three expose and FM 1 so all four coolers are compatible with pretty much every CPU socket you can think of I'm not sure what Intel's LGA 1150 or Haswell socket is in terms of the mounting I don't know if you'll need to adapt it or not but regardless all 4 coolers also offer a two-year limited parts and labor warranty in my experience both coarser and NZXT do have pretty good warranty policies the the NZXT coolers differentiate themselves a bit from the Corsair units and I already mentioned tube sizes 1 or lengths rather but NZXT kraken coolers also use a custom software solution to offer the user regulation over fan speed via voltage modulation and custom LED coloring and they even give user visibility to the temperature of the liquid and pump RPM only a Corsairs the iSeries coolers offer that functionality and neither of these are ICS that is the suffix so the h 90 and h 110 are both bereft of such features and as I discuss in the full article linked below is tech supplied coolers are tough to differentiate from each other given their similar roots but software generally does help split them apart a bit more let's talk cooling our testing methodology for these is a little bit more detailed than normally so it's in the full post below check that out if you're curious but in short we use a 4.4 gigahertz overclocked 35 70 K at 1.3 volts ish under both idle and load conditions the load is synthetically generated by prime95 s4 threaded large fft algorithm which effectively forces the CPU to perform complex computations at 100% load this is a four threaded CPU so there's that we allow the CPU to idle prior to the bench and collect thermal data under idle and then initiate a fifteen minute via prime95 SL fft test and I tested NZXT the their coolers with the pre-configured silent extreme and a custom max profile that I configured in the software and of course Corsairs are a bit simpler they just you just plug it in and go and as i rapidly found out you shouldn't take the maximum custom configuration that i created too seriously it's unbelievably loud and is entirely intolerable for any normal user so imagine playing games while the loudest most monstrous sounding vacuum cleaner you've ever known sits beside you that's about how max sounds for purely for performance reasons I left it in the bench so if you're curious it's there don't take it too seriously the coarser larger unit hovers at around thirty to thirty seven decibels under normal usage and NZXT Zechs sixty silent setting puts it slightly below that threshold but the extreme is slightly louder so it kind of flanks Corsair there if you're planning to add additional fans to these units you can calculate the increased noise level using a standard standard logarithmic function of the total fan count the output is the decimal decibel increase and as for the extra fans when I tested it there was about a two to five percent difference depending on the cooler in terms of cooling in terms of thermal dissipation so personally not worth it to me don't even worry about it just adds extra noise it's more expensive it's bigger and the advantage is minimal so so that was my my testing there on those I didn't even include it in these charts all units were tested in the top mounted position and we ran into interesting results when playing around with rear mounted 140 millimeter radiators but you can read more about that in the article Corsair hydro h 110 is the hands-down winner out of the pack at roughly 3 C cooler than NZXT Zechs 60 on a tolerable Xtreme profile and with a significantly lower idle measurement if you are going for pure performance the H 110 appears your best bet the x60 under our maximum configuration profile is basically identical to the h1 10 when it's at normal settings it's within margin of error it's like 0.1 C so we do have a 5% margin of error and the idle temperatures are strangely high on all NZXT units again I'd say discard the max settings due to noise levels your mate mainly looking at extreme and silent profiles as I mentioned in the article if you're after a low noise threshold and don't care much for an extra 3 Celsius of dissipation potential well the X 60 is an easy choice the silent profile is just too good to ignore and it does give you a bit more control over what's going on the option to create a bursty custom fan speed config is highly appealing to noise sensitive users and again if you're looking for a pure performance get the h1 10 ultimate control over noise get the X 60 pretty simple as for the smaller units the H 90 is easily the best overall value as you'll see on a chart in a moment and it's a couple degrees cooler than the X 40 on the extreme configuration and significantly cooler on air at idle it is also generally more cost friendly and if you don't care for the LED NZXT branding or software control the H 90 is the best choice between these two units it's quiet enough that personally I'd even disregard the silent setting on the X 40 in favor of the H 90 that's just me your preferences could well be different so do do a bit more research on that if if noise is something that bothers you if you are trying to use this in some sort of living room environment go with the NZXT coolers just because you'll probably want that control ultimately it'll come to price and aesthetics pick the logo you want decide if you want the led decide how important softer control is and grab your unit that's what these manufacturers are doing anyway it's all it's just build a bear put a sticker on it so you can view the full benchmark results in the link below where you'll also see how our control pasted air coolers match up against the liquid coolers and with that that's all for this roundup I will see you all next time