So today my first AIO cooler arrived, the Corsair H100i.
The first time I installed the cooler I noticed that the back plate had a lot of play to it which I thought was very suspicious at the time but for the meanwhile I left it. Upon first boot I noticed the temps were skyrocketing! I was idling at around 50c!
I knew I must have done something wrong so I decided to reseat the CPU block in case I somehow managed to fudge it up. This done nothing and the idle temps were still very high.
I turned my attention to the back plate. After taking the CPU block off I seen that the posts/threads of the back plate were protruding quite a bit through the motherboard. I used a pair of pliers to tighten the standoffs as tight as I could and put the CPU block on again. At this point I knew temps would still be bad as on the third reseat air bubbles would have set in. Temps did drop a little although they were still higher than my air cooler was at idle.
After some google-fu I seen that this is a common problem with the H100i, the rubber washers on the posts for the back plate are simply not thick enough which means that the posts protrude through the motherboard too much creating a lot of play. The solution to this was to use more washers of some sort to create more pressure on the standoffs and CPU block. Of course I did not have any immediately to hand because I did not expect this problem to occur. I did however have plenty of rubber washers that feature on many of the fan mounting points on the Corsair Carbide 400R case I own and use. These were a perfect fit for what I needed.
I added these on top of the existing rubber washers on the back plate posts and there was no play at all when I screwed in the stand offs. I then cleaned off the TIM using some Akasa cleaner and achieved a mirror shine. I applied some IC Diamond-24 and placed the CPU block on top and hoped for the best. It worked out great and my idle temperatures dropped to around 35c. To further reduce the temperature I re-enabled Intel Speedstep to reduce the multiplier when the power is not needed and I'm currently sitting on 30c idle.
I'm happy that in the end it worked out a lot better than I expected. I've tried a bit of overclocking and all I done was whack the multiplier up to 45 in the bios, nothing else. On a 4.5ghz overclock at 1.32v I get temps of 63c under full load. Not too shabby. I'm looking forward to doing a lot more in depth tinkering over the next couple of days. How does this compare to other peoples experiences?
The first time I installed the cooler I noticed that the back plate had a lot of play to it which I thought was very suspicious at the time but for the meanwhile I left it. Upon first boot I noticed the temps were skyrocketing! I was idling at around 50c!
I knew I must have done something wrong so I decided to reseat the CPU block in case I somehow managed to fudge it up. This done nothing and the idle temps were still very high.
I turned my attention to the back plate. After taking the CPU block off I seen that the posts/threads of the back plate were protruding quite a bit through the motherboard. I used a pair of pliers to tighten the standoffs as tight as I could and put the CPU block on again. At this point I knew temps would still be bad as on the third reseat air bubbles would have set in. Temps did drop a little although they were still higher than my air cooler was at idle.
After some google-fu I seen that this is a common problem with the H100i, the rubber washers on the posts for the back plate are simply not thick enough which means that the posts protrude through the motherboard too much creating a lot of play. The solution to this was to use more washers of some sort to create more pressure on the standoffs and CPU block. Of course I did not have any immediately to hand because I did not expect this problem to occur. I did however have plenty of rubber washers that feature on many of the fan mounting points on the Corsair Carbide 400R case I own and use. These were a perfect fit for what I needed.
I added these on top of the existing rubber washers on the back plate posts and there was no play at all when I screwed in the stand offs. I then cleaned off the TIM using some Akasa cleaner and achieved a mirror shine. I applied some IC Diamond-24 and placed the CPU block on top and hoped for the best. It worked out great and my idle temperatures dropped to around 35c. To further reduce the temperature I re-enabled Intel Speedstep to reduce the multiplier when the power is not needed and I'm currently sitting on 30c idle.
I'm happy that in the end it worked out a lot better than I expected. I've tried a bit of overclocking and all I done was whack the multiplier up to 45 in the bios, nothing else. On a 4.5ghz overclock at 1.32v I get temps of 63c under full load. Not too shabby. I'm looking forward to doing a lot more in depth tinkering over the next couple of days. How does this compare to other peoples experiences?
