Thermal Performance
For performance testing, I used a Ryzen 2700x at 4.15GHz and 1.35V in an Antec DF500 case with the front panel removed with a room temperature around 75F.
For each iCue performance setting, I ran Adia64 for 30 minutes before screen capturing the max temperatures.
With the iCue software, Corsair has given you the choice of 4 preset performance options that change the RPM range of the fans and pump in order to give you the choice between sound and performance. So let’s take a look at how well the H100i performs with each option.
At max speed
For this test, I set the fans to a manual 100% speed and the pump to the Extreme performance option.
I was really impressed with how well this cooler handled my OCed 2700x, It managed to keep it well under the 70c my CPU hits under load with most other 240mm AIOs. So maxed out the H100i won’t any issues cooling any supported AIO even with some heavy overclocking but what if you prioritize sound over performance?
At the extreme setting the H100i performs almost identical to setting the fans to 100%, the main difference here is that the fans don’t spin up quite as fast when your system is at idle. I’d recommend setting your cooler here if performance is your main priority but you sill value a quiet system since you get a quieter system at idle but you don’t lose out on any thermal performance when your system is stressed.
At the balanced setting you can start to see a slight increase in temperatures but even so, It still manages to perform impressively and shouldn’t require any editing to overclocks.
With the cooler on the Quiet setting, this is where temps start reaching levels where you may want to reduce overclocks if sound performance is more important than thermal performance. I will admit sound performance was amazing on this setting (more on this later) but thermal performance definitely takes a back seat here.
But if you need a nearly absolutely silent PC there’s the ZERO RPM option. As the name states this sets the fan RPM to 0 unless your system is being stressed, the pump isn’t able to run at the ZERO RPM setting so I set it to quiet for this test but you could set the pump to any speed option and set the fans to the Zero RPM option.
Temps were starting to get pretty warm here but the cooler managed to stay almost completely silent with the fans maxing out around 400 RPM. I still wouldn’t recommend running this unless you need an absolutely silent PC since the CPU was starting to get hot and you more than likely won’t be able to overclock your system quite as high on this setting.
But if none of the above options fit you there’s a custom fan curve option within iCue. This operates almost exactly like MSI afterburner where you move multiple temperature points around setting a certain speed to a temperature. This gives you a ton of choice in exactly how the cooler performs. I really appreciate Corsair giving users this option. One caveat to this is that you can’t change the RPM of the pump here so if you want to use this option I’d recommend picking a preset for the pump that matches your priorities of sound vs thermals and then makes a custom curve for the fans.
Gaming performance
During gaming, the H100i Pro performs really well maxing out in the lower 50s when playing TW3 at high settings and 4K but as you can tell my CPU is hardly breaking a sweat due to the GPU being a limiter so let’s test the CPU by lowering settings and resolution and increasing frame rates.
And temperatures are equally as impressive only getting a few degrees hotter during gaming. This is partially due to the fact that games don’t stress all of the cores in high core count CPUs but even if the entire CPU were being maxed out I have no doubts that this AIO could handle it.
Overall I was very impressed with how well the H100i can perform, it managed to keep my overclocked 8 core CPU well within a safe temperature so you definitely won’t have to worry about thermal issues with the H100i.
I rate the thermal performance 5/5. It performs noticeably better than a lot of 240mm AIOs in this price point and Corsair gives you a ton of customizability over how this cooler performs whether your priority is maxing thermal performance or silence, just keep in mind the quieter the system the hotter your CPU will be.
Now onto sound performance and build quality!
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