Wednesday, October 30, 2013

h100i quad fan push pull with SP120

I recently went with the h100i over an earlier corsair all-in-one, closed loop, water cooling system which performed well for years. The earlier h50 lasted about 3 years with an OG Core i7 running at 4.2Ghz. A task which it wasn't up to the task under full load with HT on. So I went to a push pull setup with different fans and it helped a lot but it was still noisy and would occasionally crash. This instability under full load led me to a larger all in one cooler that could run my i7 930 at 4.2GHz without a hiccup.

If your H100i doesn't seem to be controlling SP120 you should install the inline supplied SP120 voltage droppers.  For some reason this allows the h100i to have a much broader range of RPM variability and it will then sync all of the fan RPMs up to 1700 RPM which seems to be the reduced maximum.


Here's what I've found in traditional mark tech bullet format:

  • Push Pull lowers idle temp about 5-7 C from stock intake setup on HAF
    • Setting up the rear fan and case side fan to exhaust further dropped temperatures vs these being intakes as well as a top intake.
      • I didn't measure front and bottom which also remain intakes.
  • Expect another 2-3 C drop If you match fans on each side
    • e.g. 2 SP120s on top, 2 Stock h100i on the bottom vs mismatched fan sets.
  • You need to run the SP120s with the voltage droppers for them to match the rest of the H100i fans. 
    • Otherwise they run in a very narrow rpm band around 1800-2000.
    • With the voltage droppers the H100i will match RPMs between the fan sets nearly perfectly to 1700 rpm
    • not utilizing the voltage droppers does not seem to significantly increase cooling performance.  maybe 2 C
    • The SP120 voltage droppers allow the H100i to control the SP120 RPM
  • 4.2GHz I7 on Push Pull H100i ~55GFLOPS
    • quiet 37 idle 91max core reading Intel Burn Test extreme 8GB 10 runs
    • balanced 32-33 idle 89 C max ,, ,,
    • performance 86 C Max
    • max 31-32 idle 84 C Max ,, ,,
      • temp spikes seem to occur as the H100i catches up to a maximal load, however they never seem to get hot enough to cause concern in terms of stability.
  • Arctic Silver 5 drops the temperature only a degree or so from OEM goo.


Tuesday, October 22, 2013