Corsair H100i RGB Platinum Review

Written by Antony Leather

November 1, 2018 | 13:00

Tags: #aio-cooler #cooler #cpu-cooler #rgb

Companies: #corsair

Manufacturer:

UK price (as reviewed): £124.99 (inc. VAT)

US price (as reviewed): TBC

Corsair's H100i range stretches back at least six years and it has already released one 240mm cooler this year in the form of the H100i RGB Pro. How can it make it better? Add more RGB lighting, of course. but there are one or two other tweaks with the new H100i RGB Platinum.

As is probably fairly obvious, we now get digital RGB lighting on both the pump and with the ML series 120mm fans, with several individually-controllable LEDs in each via Corsair's iCUE software. We have to admit, the cooler looks pretty awesome fired up and the lighting isn't too in your face, instead dishing out a clear, vibrant array of coloured lights, set to rainbow mode by default for maximum pizzazz.

It's an otherwise typical Asetek-made affair with a familiar mounting mechanism albeit with tweaked screws but essentially blissfully simple to deal with. Thermal paste is pre-applied, too. There is a downside to that, though, which is you'll need to be extremely careful when installing the pump so not to damage the layer of thermal paste, and you can't move the cooler to another system or upgrade your CPU without needing to invest in more paste. However, with everything from old AMD CPUs to Threadripper and everything recent from Intel too, it's good to see such wide compatibility from a single cooler. The new contact plate is larger and squarer than that on the H100i Pro RGB and indeed its 280mm and 360mm siblings, no doubt to boost coverage on massive Threadripper heatspreaders.


There's one downside to RGB lighting, which is the cables. Thankfully, there's a splitter cable for both 4-pin PWM and RGB connectors, reducing the count to two nearer the pump, but at the fan end, it's spaghetti junction, and that's before you factor in the USB lead from the pump, as well, which requires the use of a spare USB 2 header. 

Enough screws are included in the box to mount not just the included pair of 120mm fans but another two, as well, in a push/pull setup, plus there are shorter screws to mount the radiator directly to the case as we have done in our testing, exhausting air out the roof.


Corsair's iCUE software has worked without a hitch and is different to the LINK software we used with the H100i Pro RGB. We used its LINK software with the H100i RGB Platinum, but here we couldn't seem to tweak anything other than the various profiles of the fans, with custom response curves and speeds not having options. However, the manual clearly shows this being an option in iCUE so we can only assume this was a hiccup with our machines install - we'll report back once we'd got to the bottom of it. The RGB control, as you can see below, was handy in tweaking the various LEDs on the fans and pump as well as picking from a variety of lighting effects.





Specifications


  • Compatibility Intel: LGA 20xx, LGA 115x, LGA 1366, LGA 775; AMD: Socket TR4, Socket AM4, Sockets AM3(+)/AM2(+)/FM2(+)/FM1
  • Radiator size 276 x 120 x 27 (W x D x H)
  • Size with fans (mm) 276 x 120 x 52 (W x D x H)
  • Fan(s) 2 x ML Pro RGB 120mm PWM, up to 2,400 RPM
  • Fan size (mm) 25 x 25 x 120
  • Stated noise 37 dB(A)
  • Extras iCUE software 


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