So before you send back a product, just do this.
delta0 - thank you so much for suggesting that I do this. I hadn't considered this option and was also being lazy. So you prompted me to stop being lazy and test it. And I'm glad you did! Although not everything went smoothly the final outcome has been positive so I think I will be keeping it subject to one concern as stated below! I elaborate below.
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 2 H100i stock fans
Test performed outside case.
- At max rpm while booting - NO GRINDING
- At low rpm after booting - GRINDING
- At explicit Quiet profile (lowest rpm profile) - GRINDING
- At all other profiles faster than Quiet - NO GRINDING
- On disconnecting fan cables - NO GRINDING
Test 2 - H100i with 2 H100i stock fans and 2 H100 stock fans
Test performed outside case. Exactly the same results as Test 2
Test 3 - 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 2 with one difference - SP120 fans make marginally quieter grinding sounds at low rpm.
Test 4 - 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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Hope that helps you guys out. Delta0 you must be the only lucky guy to get a perfectly working model!