Corsair Hydro Series H110 Review

Corsair Hydro Series H110 Testing:

Testing of Corsair's Hydro Series high performance liquid cooler, the H110, will be accomplished installing the cooler into the test system mounted into a case, not a test bench. Most systems are built and mounted into a sealed (relatively) chassis, so this method will be used to generate the load and idle results to give a real world view as to what kind of cooling performance one can expect, based on the test system listed below. Of course, your results may vary, due to case design and ambient air temperature by several degrees. The CPU load is generated by Prime 95 version 27.7 for a period of two hours, with a cool down period of one hour, after the computer has returned to an idle state. Real Temp 3.70 is used to log the temperatures over the time frame with the highest and lowest averages across the four cores of the Core i7 2600K test CPU. Ambient temperatures are kept at 24 °C throughout the testing to minimize the impact of a variable temperature. Each cooler is tested with the manufacturer supplied thermal compound as delivered. Many of us have our own TIM favorites, but for the end-user without a half dozen tubes of thermal paste laying around, the supplied TIM will have to do and is how these coolers will be tested.

Testing Setup:

• Processors: Core i7 2600K @ 4.3 GHz 100 x 43 1.30v
• CPU Cooling: Corsair Hydro Series H110 High Performance Liquid Cooling
• Motherboard: Gigabyte Z68AP-D3
• Memory: Mushkin 993997 9-11-10-28 1866Mhz
• Video Card: XFX HD 7970 Black Edition
• Power Supply: Corsair AX1200
• Hard Drive: Corsair Force GT 240GB
• Optical Drive: Lite-On Blu-Ray
• Case: Corsair Obsidian 650D
• OS: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
• Temperature:  24 °C

Comparison Coolers:

• Noctua NH-U12P SE
• Phanteks PH-TC14PE
• Sapphire Vapor-X CPU COoler
• Corsair Hydro Series H80
• Corsair Hydro Series H60
• Phanteks TC90LS
• Noctua NH-L9i
• Phanteks PH-TC12DX
• Corsair Hydro Series H90
• Corsair Hydro Series H100

At idle the Hydro H80 delivered lower temperatures in both stock and overclocked trim on the Core i7 2600K. When it comes to load temperatures, the H110 is hands down the winner in these tests again both stock and overclocked. In stock trim the Hydro H110 delivers temperatures 30 °C cooler than the reference cooling solution and over 50 °C cooler when overclocked. When compared to the H100, the Hydro Series H110 maintains a 5 °C margin under load, stock and overclocked.