Really load Fans

[alexgcabal]

Hello guys, yesterday I bought an h100i elite caliper white and I'm new to water cooling. Once I entered a random game, after 15 minutes of warm-up and load, my fans did ramp slowly up to 2.4k RPM making my pc sound like an airplane. My cpu temp was fine, the max was 64 degree C, but it was sitting around 55-60 most of the time. My idle cpu temp is around 38 degree C.

My GPU temp is around 73 degree during gaming.

All good besides the sound itself from the fans, the pump is dead silent. 

Before my AIO cooler, I had an old Hyper 212 Evo, which my temps were not very much different  (max was 72 C, average 63 C),   and it was really quiet, so I'm quite disappointed about the AIO cooling performance itself.

 

I did follow some suggestion and put all the fans & pump on the AIO to Quiet preset, indeed, the maximum RPM was 1800-1900, the temp are a little bit higher, but slowly, after long session the coolant temperature keeps rising and RPM's keeps getting higher, so it's the same evolution, but takes more to build up.

 

Are there other new suggestion or this is how the AIO should behave? Someone told make a custom curve and cap my fan up to certain value, but doing so, based on my understating, the coolant temp will keep rising, resulting in higher cpu temp, so not really a solution I see it myself.

 

Thanks for reading

[LeDoyen]

you could install the AIO on the front of the case, so it doesn't get heated up by the hot air from the GPU, and only has fresh outside air going through.

If the AIO water sits at 35° when you game, and that your GPU blasts 60° air onto it, you can see where it's going.

That could be one solution

[alexgcabal]

3 minutes ago, LeDoyen said:

you could install the AIO on the front of the case, so it doesn't get heated up by the hot air from the GPU, and only has fresh outside air going through.

If the AIO water sits at 35° when you game, and that your GPU blasts 60° air onto it, you can see where it's going.

That could be one solution

That's a point, but I prefer not to do it. I don't get it how a poor hyper 212 evo, bought back in 2013, could behave good in the same setup. As I said, besides looks and some little better cooling performance(however under really loud conditions), the performance of the AIO is kinda poor.

[LeDoyen]

well, the hyper212 was probably blowing to the back, so, less warm air was hitting it. now the AIO is getting almost all the exhaust air.

You can put any AIO in that spot it will have the same performance when getting hot air through the rad.

Removing the Evo, you changed the airflow of the case so it can't compare like for like now.

The radiator is very efficient at getting heat out.. and in too. That's what i was pointing at. When mixing AIO with aircooled GPU, it's always better to have the AIO as intake. It can be top intake too if you want to give it a go by just giving the fans a 180° for testing. less hassle.

 

[alexgcabal]

I think I have my fans as exhaust (facing the gpu), since I saw many pictures online as this way mounted, however the manual does recommend intake setup. More or less it does make sense, that it takes hot air from the gpu below. By searching online I saw that there is no actual difference between setups, but will get it a try since I have nothing to lose. Thanks.

[c-attack]

Also, presumably the source of the heat is the GPU and if it heats the internal air temp up to 40-50C, then no amount of fan speed will change that.  You can't bring the coolant below the ambient air temp.  In that situation, set your custom curve to tolerable fan speed levels.  Sometimes the reduction will allow the rear fan to take a larger share and you get a slight reduction in coolant temp with a large reduction in noise.  

[alexgcabal]

I did change my AIO fans to intake, there is an improvement, the fans RPM didn't exceed 1650, also, the cpu package temp was cooler. However, the downside, my gpu temp did go up, for the first time I saw 76 degree C, which I only had 73 back, which it does ramp up my gpu fans up to 2.4k very often, I don't remember ever exceeding 2.2k. So in terms of noise, it's better, my 2 gpu fans are quiter than my 2 radation fans at max speed, but still it's disappointing.

Should I put one fan on the radiator 1 exhaust and 1 intake, does it sound stupid?

 

When I had my air cooler build (Hyper 212), on the case I had attached 2 exhaust fans, one on the rear and one on the top.

[Corsair Notepad]

How many exhaust fans do you have in your case currently with the cooler in the front as intake?

[LeDoyen]

@Corsair Notepad the cooler is up top 🙂

If flipping the fans reduced the AIO temp then it's sure that was caused by GPU heat.

Ideally, to get both cool CPU and GPU you'd want to put the AIO to the front, pulling air into the case, and get back and top fans exhausting air.

The AIO would always be fresh, and the air it exhaust will be just mildly warm, and should not affect the GPU noticeably.

 

Right now, the GPU pushes air up against the AIO airflow so it's recirculating its own heat., that's why you lost a few °C during the test.

If you put one fan as intake and one as exhaust, same story, it will recirculate a lot and make things worse.

With such a big heat exchanger (the radiator) you have to start to think about the entire case's airflow.

The hottest component is your GPU and it needs fresh air at the bottom to blow it upwards, so ideally you want the air to go from the front to the top.

If you can't put the AIO on the top for reasons you experienced, that leaves only the front.

That's why most people install it there

[c-attack]

Don't run the radiator fans in a cross directional configuration.  That never works out.

 

Ultimately it's pretty difficult to make universal improvements.  Improving one area may detract from another.  What is worth more?  3C CPU or GPU?  Hard to say.  Neither unless you are sitting on the edge of down clocking temperature zone.  However, once you have established the coolant temp is more or less the same as what the MB sensor reads as general ambient, then you can back off the radiator fan speed and reduce the noise -- which was the original problem.  I am not sure any of us can gift you -10C across the board, but you can take control of the fans without a large penalty to the CPU.  

[alexgcabal]

To be honest, the trade-off is not really worth it, I will put again my AIO fans to exhaust mode. I did tweak a bit the fan curve of my front intake fans to run on higher rpm, hopefully it will help a little bit. As for the gpu performance, made a benchmark before & after the change, even if running on higher temperature, my clocks didn’t suffer.

What will continue from now on, I will monitor how high the AIO fans do go, before the change they were sitting at 1800-1900 RPM and coolant had a max of 38C, mostly staying at 36, will play a bit with the custom curve to see what I'm getting.

 

Anyway, leaving aside the AIO performance, today I played a bit with the corsairs Hubs, which i have the Lightning Core Node (from the case) and the Commander Pro (from the AIO). I did plug the rgb connectors from case fans from the core node to the commander pro and to my surprise, it works, the iCue app detects all the rgb fans, which means I am safe to remove the lightning core from my case, more space and less wires( as long as I have max 6 fans, which the case supports). However, what I didn't understand, why the fans don't spin up if I connect them to the FAN slots on the commander pro. 

If I close the iCue app, they do start to spin up, if I reopen iCue, the still spin up but on Cooling tab I see still the same 2 fans from my AIO and coolant reading, no extra fans. Is there a logical limitation here?

Edited November 23, 2021 by alexgcabal

[c-attack]

Just remember that +1C to coolant temp is only +1C to cpu temp. So there is no need to go crazy with fan speed to drop 2C. This also is another reason to use manual fan curves instead of the presets that will produce a strong response at 40C - an easy to reach temp with the gpu in full song for an extended period. The presets are available as those shape tools in the custom curve area except now you can see the control points and move them. Drag the max point further down the temp scale. Reduce the fan speed at your normal idle coolant temp, etc.  

 

It looks like you have the 3 SP-Elite in front and then the 2 ML-Elite OEM fans up top. Those are all 8 LED and a lighting match. The odd ball is the QL in back at 34 LEDs or effectively a double sided 16 LED fan. The Commander Core from the elite AIO uses an auto-detect function to assess the lineup and will use the greatest common factor as the base unit. In this case that’s the QL. So effects on the 8 LED fans might seem fast at times compared to the rear, but it’s equal most of the way through so it may not matter. I also think that is better than running a separate controller for the QLx1 and thus forcibly separating it into its own 1 fan series.
 

The Commander Core also uses an auto detect for PWM function and will shut off headers it thinks are not in use. If the other fans are not detected in the cooling tab, try a full shutdown then power in again. The device needs a power cycle to re-assess and doesn’t take to hot plugging while powered on. You be able control all of them. **Make sure you set the sensor choice to H1xx Temp in the custom curve. That is the coolant temp. You can use other stuff for the non-radiator fans like gpu temp or mb temp, but those require the software to be active and may not be as efficient with more frequent and unnecessary speed changes. Don’t use cpu temp. That is the previous statement in extreme form. 

[alexgcabal]

@c-attackmy bad, the rear fan is NOT a corsair one, it's a no-name one with RGB, but not usable with corsair hubs. I did recover it from my old pc till I will receive my SP 120 Elite one, so in this way, all of them will be an 8-led type.

I didn't know about how the coolant temp works togheter with CPU temp, will take in mind to not ramp up too much my other fans for nothing and just modify the aio custom curve to my likening; hopefully the coolant temp won't sky-rocket over a long sesion under load.

 

About the Commander, I had no problem installing the lightning part, did run the setup wizard in iCue app and I've selected the correct fan types, the ligthning works nice & smooth.

As for Cooling/Fan part, I do remember that after I did power cycle a few times, the extra fans were indeed spinning, however I couldn't see them in Cooling section of iCue app. I had only the 2 aio fans, the pump and the coolant temp widget, which means I couldn't control/see how the SP fans do work.

Maybe this is a software limitation of the commander being paired with the aio? Is there a wizard setup for the fans also, like the one from lightning part? I will try today a little more to test them and hopefully will be shown.