H110i v2 noise and management issues

Hi All,

I purchased the H110i v2 a while back have been a little frustrated with it. All my friends who have liquid cooling raved about how quiet they were and easy to setup.

I agree with the ease of setup but maybe that's where I encountered my problems. Who knows.

Once I installed it and started some gaming I immediately noticed that it seemed way noisier than my old fan. So I started looking into it and installed the iCUE software. From there I picked the quiet profile for the fans and extreme on the pump. Seemed a little better but still not what I was hoping for.

After a little more research I found some threads about creating a custom profile for better management and to tell the fans to respond the pump temperature as by default I guess it watches the CPU. So I tried that and again got better results, but still seemed like it was getting hot and turning the fans to high.

The other problem I encountered is that iCUE seems to lock up ALL the time. Minutes after restarting the service I will go check the dashboard (when I am watching and tweaking) only to see that all the graphs have frozen again. It also seems like when this happens the pump and fan seem to go into overdrive.

I mean, I am gaming with this thing on games running high settings so I expect everything to get worked but it just doesn't seem like it takes much to get everything working super hard.

I guess lastly, I have a suspicion my case might be choking the airflow a bit.

What are others using for a setup? Should I uninstall iCUE and try Corsair Link instead? Is there some better 3rd party management tool that would work better?

I am running this over a i7 6700k.

Thanks!

Eric

There have been some other recent complaints about lock ups and the H110i. Not really sure what that is at this point. It is probably the service or app crashing. Next time see if there is a corresponding event in the Event Viewer in Windows.

Yes, you need to stay on the custom fan curves. There really is no reason to use the presets. They were made by someone else with a different PC who is in a different room. A 6700K even when overclocked won't put out a ton of watts. That doesn't mean the CPU isn't going to get hot, but it does mean the coolant rise is going to be small and you won't need a lot of fan speed. You need to find a comfortable fan speed and keep it under that. Little changes in fan speed will have at most a 0-1C different at small wattage loads. I think 140s generally start to get noisy as you go past 900 rpm and then definitely loud at 1100-1300. There really is no reason to use more than that for anything. When stress testing on my H115i Pro, the coolant delta is about +5 with the fans at 1100. No reason to run 2000 rpm to reduce that by 1-2C. Pump speed should make no difference between the low and high setting.

You really shouldn't see much more than a +6C change in coolant temperature. If it is more than that, than we probably need to look at your physical set-up or general case layout.

If the H110i is the only Corsair iCUE device you have, there is no harm in trying Link as a means to addressing the lock up/freeze issue. However, note that support for Link ended last year, so that may not be a long term solution. The H110i should work with Link. Your profiles will not carry over and you'll need to make new curves.

Should I base the profile around the h110 temp or the proc temp?

And I am pretty sure its the service crashing. I've had a couple of instances of going back into iCUE and being bombarded with a slew of yellow warnings saying failed to start service.

H110i Temp (Coolant temperature) is the best measure of efficiency and the only thing the pump and fans can alter. CPU temp is mostly voltage based. The pins supply current, CPU heats up. The heat is then conducted out into the coolant stream. You can't control the voltage/temp aspect with the cooler and the CPU temp rise is instantaneous with applied load. You can only prevent CPU temps from being worse with cooler settings. I sometime refer to it as "waste heat management". You only need to keep the trash heat from piling up.

Coolant temp is effective minimum possible CPU temperature. Each degree of coolant change will be +-1C to the CPU. So +4C coolant rise is only 4C of the 60-75C you are seeing. Voltage is always going to be the limiting factor on most CPUs.

I uninstalled iCUE and tried LINK. Seems to work fine. Set the fan speed at constant 45% which seems to keep it right about 1000 rpm and I barely hear it. Unfortunately it seems to have some issues with monitoring the fan on the pump and loses track of what speed its at. I'll give iCUE another crack with a fresh install but I wont hold my breath.

Thanks again for the great input!

Eric