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My personal findings with my new H100i tested outside of case


Narada

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TESTING PHASE 1

 

I did a multitude of tests which I detail below for you guys. Note that machine is integrated with H100 at the moment. So all H100i testing took place outside the case.

 

Test 1 - Corsair Link detection and LED test

 

Plugged in usb cable from H100i into USB2 MB header. Installed Corsair Link 2.1.7 and it picked up the two fans as well as a bunch of other system stuff. LED configuration works fine and also allows lighting to correspond to load which is nice.

 

The only issue I had is after rebooting a few times at some point the booting process became excrutiatingly slow. The bios screen would take ages and the windows startup screen would progress painfully slowly. I found that simply removing the usb cable instantly sped it up to normal speed. I don't know why this happened. Maybe it was some kind of conflict between the H100 already plugged in via the cpu fan header and the H100i plugged in at the same time via usb. If anyone knows what's going on here please let me know. I'm hoping once I replace the H100 with the H100i this will work fine.

 

Test 2 - H100i with no fans; pump only

 

No noise.

 

Test 3 - H100i with 2 H100i stock fans

 

Test performed outside case.

 

  1. At max rpm while booting - NO GRINDING
  2. At low rpm after booting - GRINDING
  3. At explicit Quiet profile (lowest rpm profile) - GRINDING
  4. At all other profiles faster than Quiet - NO GRINDING
  5. On disconnecting fan cables - NO GRINDING

 

Test 4 - H100i with 2 H100i stock fans and 2 H100 stock fans

 

Test performed outside case. Exactly the same results as Test 3.

 

Test 5 - H100i with 2 SP120 fans

 

This test was performed by disconnecting the two SP120 fans already connected to my current H100 and plugging them into the H100i pump. Then I altered rpm profiles via link and found the results to tbe exactly the same as Test 3 with one difference - SP120 fans make marginally quieter grinding sounds at low rpm.

 

Test 6 - Pump noise

 

There is no noticeable pump noise unless you actually hold the pump directly onto your ear in which case there is a slight buzzing noise but as soon as you take it away from your ear it's inaudible so my guess is that this is normal behaviour and the noise would not be audible once inside your case.

 

Observations

 

  1. The grinding only occurs at the lowest rpm profile. I don't know what that rpm boundary above which grinding doesn't occur but I can tell you that any profile above Quiet (which is the lowest profile) works absolutely fine.
  2. An interesting finding was that once you'd gone higher than the Quiet profile, the next being Balanced, changing to any profile between Balanced and Maximum produced no difference in sound level. So starting from Quiet, you'd hear grinding, then switching to Balanced you'd just hear normal fan noise which would be quiet but then switching to say Maximum which was the highest rpm profile would produce no noticeable increase in noise though it would raise the rpm to around 1250 or so. This is good news. It shows the quality of the fans and proves that only the grinding is a problem.
  3. The corsair link software does detect as many fans as you plug in (in real time) and allows you an impressive degree of system monitoring as well as configurability of your H100i fans. It monitors the cpu fans, the corsair ssd temperatures and also the gpu fans. For the H100i fans it provides a range of around five profiles as well as allowing you to set fixed and % based rpms.

 

Conclusion

 

The grinding issue although displeasing can be overcome by switching all fans to the Balanced profile. The Corsair Link software for the first few reboots detected the fans fine and did not affect the performance of the machine at all. But at some point the boot process and windows slowed down to a crawl until the usb cable was removed from the MB header. This is the only thing concerning me now. If I can get assurance that this wouldn't happen without both H100 and H100i plugged in then I would feel better and install the H100i. Any feedback from official sources and otherwise welcome. Particularly on what's going on with the slowdown and whether it was because I was using both coolers at once.

 

TESTING PHASE 2

 

In phase 2 of testing which I carried out tonight (2012-11-18) I wanted to see if I could first of all get corsair link to re-detect my fans as it was doing previously before it stopped working and I also wanted to see if with updated drivers I could avoid the excruciating slowdown that was occurring with the usb cable plugged into the mb header.

 

I updated *all* my drivers - bios, chipset, everything I could find off asus's website since this recommendation seems to appear so often in response to posts about problems with the h100i and corsair link. I then uninstalled corsair link and booted the machine with the h100i plugged in to the psu and the usb cable plugged in to the header. The boot was painfully slow. The windows logo animation took absolutely ages and froze occassionally but then continued. At this point I took the usb cable out. Once windows had booted the slowdown persisted. Simple things like windows minimising and maximising were very slow. I rebooted without the usb cable plugged in and everything was fine again.

 

Then I plugged in the usb cable after booting. This time the slowdown was not there. I installed corsair link and checked if it detected the fans but it didn't. Instead I got a windows taskbar notification saying that the device driver had not been installed correctly. I checked device manager and an HID compliant device kept continually switching between unknown and an HID compliant device with a working device driver. It was alternating about once every two seconds continuously.

 

At this point, for reasons unknown to me, the two fans plugged into the H100i stopped spinning completely and now there was nothing further I could do or test so I removed the h100i and packed it back into its box for return.

 

QUESTIONS/POINTS FOR RAMGUY/CORSAIR

 

1. There is a grinding issue with the fans at low rpm only in Quiet mode above which this problem does not occur.

2. There is a detection issue with corsair link where it does not always detect the h100i. Sometimes it does. At other times it fails to.

3. There is a serious resource issue being caused by the usb cable the root cause of which I don't know but it affects the entire software lifecycle by which I mean right from the point the bios appears through to the point where windows has booted and is being used there is a serious slowdown all the way through even at the bios level.

4. There is a serious resource issue in windows itself where Sierra2.GPU.exe and sierra2service are doing something and taking up resource. I'm not exactly sure what's going on here. With the usb cable plugged in there is definitely a slowdown but whether or not the cable is plugged in the link software does seem to take up more cpu cycles than anything else running on my machine though to be quite frank the Sierra2.GPU.exe was only taking up around 5% cpu so although that's more than all other processes I don't know why it would cause such a slowdown in general. Incidentally, I was thinking this may just be me but there has been another report of choppy/slow behaviour with link on this forum so may not just be me.

 

Feedback welcome. Although I will not be keeping this device for further testing because I cannot invest any more time in this endeavour it would still be great to get feedback from official sources as to what's going on and what solutions are being made available. Thanks.

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Wow you just saved me a boat load of time, I was going to do similar tests tonight. Im curious about the whole boot issue with the usb cable as well.

 

I dont see how the h100 and h100i would conflict with one another as the h100 has no data connection. Are you using a corsair commander maybe with the h100 and then the h100I?

 

i don't see how the bios would hang in any situation. unless its trying to poll that usb header for possible boot devices. Thats the only thing i could see causing a delay in boot.

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Yeah I'm confused as well. H100 only has a fan cable connected to the cpu fan header so the slowdown is probably not a conflict between the two coolers. And regarding the bios polling usb for boot devices it seems unlikely to be the cause since the slowdown continues permanently even when Windows boot has begun. So it's clearly something hardware related that persists throughout the entire duration but only occurs when the H100i usb cable is plugged in. Baffling.
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Yeah I'm confused as well. H100 only has a fan cable connected to the cpu fan header so the slowdown is probably not a conflict between the two coolers. And regarding the bios polling usb for boot devices it seems unlikely to be the cause since the slowdown continues permanently even when Windows boot has begun. So it's clearly something hardware related that persists throughout the entire duration but only occurs when the H100i usb cable is plugged in. Baffling.

 

Fill out your system specs, it will help us help you!

 

 

:)

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Done. Been meaning to do this for a while. Thanks for the prompt! As you can see most of my stuff is from Corsair (that's commitment and loyalty Corsair!) and the rest from Asus! :)

 

Im running a Maximus V Gene, now im contemplating about taking my h100i out and trying it. Not really sister boards, but close enough in my book.

 

Do you have another computer you can try the h100i in, that would save some time, might actually be the h100i it self.

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Sadly not. This is a new build because I didn't have a PC (my first build actually ever). The only other thing I have is a Macbook Air. I'll do some more testing tomorrow and have a look around the bios to see what I can disable. I'll also maybe reinstall corsair link. It was working fine with everything plugged in and outside the case. I don't know what caused the issue. There's another person on the other thread reporting choppy/slow game performance when link is installed. It maybe related I don't know.
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Sadly not. This is a new build because I didn't have a PC (my first build actually ever). The only other thing I have is a Macbook Air. I'll do some more testing tomorrow and have a look around the bios to see what I can disable. I'll also maybe reinstall corsair link. It was working fine with everything plugged in and outside the case. I don't know what caused the issue. There's another person on the other thread reporting choppy/slow game performance when link is installed. It maybe related I don't know.

 

You are right about other people having performance issues with the corsair link stuff. I sent you a PM what my solution is.

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Ramguy/corsair/everyone - I did a second bout of testing tonight and have appended the writeup for that to the bottom of my original post under the title of Testing Phase 2. I've also added a summary section of questions/problems for when ramguy/corsair gets back on Monday morning. Please have a read and kindly provide feedback. Thanks.
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It really sounds like that the unit it self is defective. I really want to help you in your quest of trying to figure out these problems but I refuse to open my unit as I'll get nocked a restocking fee.

 

It would only be fair that corsair gets back to you. If anything they might want the h100i unit you have for testing.

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4. There is a serious resource issue in windows itself where Sierra2.GPU.exe and sierra2service are doing something and taking up resource. I'm not exactly sure what's going on here. With the usb cable plugged in there is definitely a slowdown but whether or not the cable is plugged in the link software does seem to take up more cpu cycles than anything else running on my machine though to be quite frank the Sierra2.GPU.exe was only taking up around 5% cpu so although that's more than all other processes I don't know why it would cause such a slowdown in general. Incidentally, I was thinking this may just be me but there has been another report of choppy/slow behaviour with link on this forum so may not just be me.

 

Run ProcessMonitor to see what the services are doing.

 

As for the BIOS/Boot Slowdown, I think that is the BIOS waiting for a response from the USB device which is not getting anything back causing the delay times.

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  • 3 weeks later...
TESTING PHASE 1

 

The only issue I had is after rebooting a few times at some point the booting process became excrutiatingly slow. The bios screen would take ages and the windows startup screen would progress painfully slowly. I found that simply removing the usb cable instantly sped it up to normal speed. I don't know why this happened. Maybe it was some kind of conflict between the H100 already plugged in via the cpu fan header and the H100i plugged in at the same time via usb. If anyone knows what's going on here please let me know. I'm hoping once I replace the H100 with the H100i this will work fine.

 

 

I have noticed this same issue. When I changed the USB connector to a different header from the original one it was installed in when I set it up, corsairlink couldn't see/report any of it's devices and it made boot times excruciatingly slow (particularly because this build is brand new and with only an SSD right now, it boots in 5 seconds) for it to take up to a minute to boot was really odd. I also got seemingly random hangs where nothing on the computer would respond to clicks, (web browser, start menu, etc) until I moved the usb connector back to the original header.

 

Also, I note many people saying the H100i shows up in device manager, but I do not see it there at all.

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The H100i won't appear in Device manager as it uses the default HID drivers. So it would probably be listed as "HID Compliant Device".

 

Thanks RAM Guy, that saves me from thinking there is another bit of flakiness with this device.

 

I am still getting these intermittent system halts though, where the computer just stops responding, and 30 seconds later finally reacts to all of the mouse clicks or typing I did in rapid succession when it does come back to life. It is definitely related to this hardware though because this is a clean new build and that is the only item in this box, other than the APU, RAM, and 1 SSD. I had not experienced that at all until installing the the H100i. I've noticed it even interrupting the boot process as Narada pointed out, but it was worst when I had moved which header the USB connector for the H100i was plugged in to.

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have you checked the external usb ports that has devices connected to them?i had a mini keyboard that i had to move to another port because it was conflicting and caused alot of intermittent problems

 

The only things plugged into the external USB ports are a standard keyboard and mouse, no special software. I certainly hope that's not what's causing the conflict. I only have two USB 2.0 ports on this thing, the rest are USB 3.0 and there is nothing at all plugged into them.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Hi !

 

I did some tests with my H100i and I found a temporary fix that works for me :

 

If I plug the stock fans to a cooling node with the FW 1.2.5, the high pitch noise disapears but the grinding noise from the begining comes back.

 

But if I plug the stock fans on a cooling node with the old firmware 1.1.12, the fans becomes perfectly silent and I can control them with the software.

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  • 5 months later...
Hi !

 

I did some tests with my H100i and I found a temporary fix that works for me :

 

If I plug the stock fans to a cooling node with the FW 1.2.5, the high pitch noise disapears but the grinding noise from the begining comes back.

 

But if I plug the stock fans on a cooling node with the old firmware 1.1.12, the fans becomes perfectly silent and I can control them with the software.

 

Im having exacly this same issue

Where can i get that firmware, and how do i manage to update it?

 

http://i.imgur.com/nYYsMda.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/3anlSqD.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/FeSfBrh.png

http://youtu.be/ffB8W6EVyW4

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The firmware Ash_0 posted is for the Cooling Node.

 

Are your CPU temps fine? The second picture with the CPU_FAN at 578RPM isn't normal. or you plugged a fan in that port.

 

Thats the Corsair pump speed, already send the h100i to Corsair RMA, they sending me a new one, since this is definitely not working good.

 

ty for reply

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