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Corsair H100 Dual 120mm Radiator CPU Liquid Cooler Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips

2011-08-10
by popular demand this is my unboxing of the corsair h 100 so this is I can tell you already this is going to be one of if not the highest performance prefilled pre sealed water cooling kits available on the market and Corsair actually this this blew me away they do not do themselves justice at all with the numbers that they're giving on the back of the box here so you know I'll get into those a little bit more after why don't I talk about what this product is exactly so we're all familiar with the age 50 the age 60 the H is there's an HD h 70 the H 80 so these are all Corsairs prefilled liquid cooling solutions that are maintenance-free so it means you never have to fill it with water they are high-performance they're also lightweight that's one of the advantages of these prefilled liquid cooling systems versus a heat sink because you can strap the huge heavy part of it the radiator to your chassis instead of strapping it directly to your CPU socket which makes them more shipping friendly it also means that you can carry the heat away from the CPU much more efficiently and exhaust the heat directly out of your case rather than exhausting it from the CPU socket area to the air around the CPU socket area you can just kick it right out so general advantages of these water-cooled systems are many they are fairly expensive but they do have the performance to back it up so let's see what Corsair has to say for themselves on the packaging here courser link digital support is supported by the H 100 so you can be in complete control of your cooling monitor or wide range of parameters including pump speed coolant temperature and fan speed and customize your own performance profiles requires the course or link commander which is sold separately so there you go you will have to get the commander if you want to take advantage of that particular functionality all right box contents we'll get into that when we open it up so don't worry too much about that see if you have compatibility is pretty much everything on the market right now 775 1155 and 11:56 same same mounting holes 1366 a.m. to and AM three remember a.m. to name three are also a.m. to plus and am3+ in terms of heatsink compatibility cooling performance for the most demanding systems this is true performance times to see this is actually probably more accurate than what they're saying over here control at your fingertips the integrated public pool play includes push-button control so you can select the fan speed and cooling performance setup the best suits your needs white LED display lets you know the glance which profile is being used so let's have a look at this alright h100 they're saying is going to be good for sixty six point five degrees celsius okay and they're saying the h eighty is at sixty eight point two degrees celsius let me tell you what is wrong with this picture the h 100 just by merit of being a dual radiator has far more usable surface area for cooling than something like an h eighty even though it uses a double thick rad the reason that that test is so flawed is that course there is only clocking that cpu that core i7 cpu actually here let me get all the stuff out of the box here first and then i'm going to go back i'm going to show you that chart again they're only clocking that 1366 core i7 cpu at 3.8 gigahertz that means they're not really dumping a whole lot of voltage into it now at 66 point five degrees you still have room to put more voltage into that CPU i would say you should be able to get a significantly better overclock out of the h 100 then either of these other coolers and the reason is that as soon as you increase the heat load that you are putting on the cooler a better cooler will start to distance itself far more from an inferior one versus if you have a heat load that's much smaller so if you were to take a stock cpu and show this graph I'm willing to bet all the water cooling solutions would be about equal but as soon as you start to overclock the CPU more over volt it more and dump in more heat you're going to see dramatically better performance from any cooler that either has faster fans or more surface area that is what all cooling comes down to surface area and airflow alright so let's look at the at the radiator unit itself in a moment and let's start with the documentation so first thing here is we've got the parts list of everything that's included as well as picture instructions of how to mount the CPU block very nice okay stop do not return this product to the story nice little solutions guy 2010 oops guys it's 2011 now that's okay um tapping hardware we find funking billion in one screws in here so those are going to help you mount it to whatever socket it is that you need to mount it to we've got an Intel backplate here okay so you can see these are adjustable for all the different sockets you might need to mount it to and then we have the AMD hold down hardware here alright included fans I'm not oh these are nice ok I was about to say I'm not a big fan of the fans that are included with the with the corsair water cooling solutions typically but I have not yet unboxed the the h-60 or the H 100 which are the new coolant ones the pool it designed one so this as far as I can tell it's just a corsair sticker over what appears to be the same fan that cool it used to use I can I'm just I'm guessing here because the frame overall has very little flex in it it feels like a much better constructed fan than the ones that I've seen included on previous Corsair and liquid cooling systems this is a very encouraging step in the right direction and as we come to expect from Corsair it's got nice black cables on it which means it's going to look slick in your system alright so let's look at the h80 itself we have power as well as an RPM monitor so you are going to need to plug these both in separately but you can separate them out further if you need to route them to separate parts of the case so and they are black so you should be able to hide them fairly easily in any enthusiasts looking system we've also got and this is related to the these separate fan control that it does allow with the commander software we've also got other fan headers so we've got one for pin two for pin 3 for 4 pin PWM fan headers on the side of the CPU block pump unit itself on this side we've also got a little proprietary plug right there and then on the other side we have nothing except for the rotating hose fittings right there so what that allows you to do is wherever you've got this radiator mounted in your case most cases are going to use this as a top mounted rad you will be able to have flexibility on the CPU block depending where your socket is located and you're not going to put undue tension on the hosing itself which is 1/4 inch and it is a corrugated tough plastic that will allow reasonable flexibility but don't overdo it because if you can't get there as a potential you could damage it alright the block itself has thermal compound pre applied now I know for a fact this is a very high quality thermal compound you actually won't get much benefit from replacing it with an aftermarket one however once you've mounted it once and taken it off you will have to take this off and reapply thermal compound again ok just an FYI for you guys now let's have a look at the radiator itself so this is a fairly typical thickness for a radiator it's a touch thinner than something from a hardware labs but it's about I'd say it's actually yeah it's thinner than something from Swift tech as well but just by merit of how large it is so let's hold up the 120 millimeter fan for comparison so this is a dual 120 mil rad you will get excellent performance out of it as soon as you start dumping more heat into it so you can see actually you know what why don't we do the iPhone comparison just so you guys can see this now I'm not going to expect you to be able to eyeball whether this is going to fit in your case or not just based on my video what you will need to do is do a little bit of research now I'm going to tell you there's a few cases that it'll fit in no problem it'll fit in the 800 d it'll fit in actually here maybe crazy russian nose dude if does it fit in the 650d yeah he says it fits in the 650d so anything that supports dual 120 mils in the top has adequate spacing remember not just for the radiator but also for the fan has clearance for the barbs to come out and has the correct spacing for the 120 millimeter fan mounts some cases actually have dual 120 millimeter fans but they're spaced out so what that means is that when go to mount your fans on here and then pull your fans to the case you can see Corsair uses a standard spacing which means that there's no gap between the fans if your case has them like this then it's not going to be natively supported and you may have to do some modoch in order to make it fit okay guys I think that's pretty much all that there is to say now I do want to do some performance evaluation of this unit just to back up the claims that I'm making about how it's going to perform very very well but I think that covers everything I wanted to do with this unbox and thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Corsair H 100 don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech tips from our unboxings reviews and other computer videos and one more thing sorry I'm going to do this before I cut the end of the video this button right here is the one that allows you to see which profile you are using while the device is turned on and it does have a white LED display or not display it has a white LED backlight behind it
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