Corsair Hydro Series H80i Liquid CPU Cooler Review

At stock we can see little to no difference between the H80i and H100i. They were literally the same to 1 decimal place with both being tested in quiet mode. I was pretty impressed with how well the H80i kept up with the H100i much larger radiator. At stock the H80i left much more expensive solutions biting the dust like the Swiftech H220, Cooler Master Eisberg 240L Prestige and Enermax ELC 240.

The Corsair H80i was also reasonably quiet, and marginally quieter than the H100i. Though there was still a tad of whine coming from the fans, though this can be eliminated with H80i firmware updates or by using the fans as PWM and connecting them to your motherboard headers.

Overclocked CPU temperatures were done using the pump at 12 volts (as it is totally silent at 12 volts) and with the fans in a variety of settings – maximum, quiet mode, balance mode and performance mode. The three “modes” were set using Corsair Link software while maximum was done wiring the fans in directly to the PSU.

At maximum we can see the Corsair H80i grabs a tiny win over its nearest competitor the Water 3.0 Pro. Considering it has a much slimmer radiator this is a very impressive result indeed. Under performance and balanced mode we saw very little difference in performance but quite a lot of difference in noise. Yet the Corsair H80i again is narrowly ahead of the Water 3.0 Pro despite its smaller size. Under quiet mode we see the unit drop back quite far and overall the Corsair H80i is not that far off the Corsair H100i. Our testing does reveal quite a big gap, but on different platforms and CPUs, such as LGA 2011 or the higher TDP 4770K, you will find that the gap between the H100i and H80i can be much narrower. Overall the H80i performs brilliantly for its size and price point, but how did the noise hold up?

The Corsair H80i wasn’t that quiet and was similar to the H100i in that even at “quiet mode” it performed similarly to other units operating in PWM (like the Water 3.0 Pro, ELC 120 and so on). Most of this noise came from the fans as the pump was very quiet, I’d say the Corsair H80i certainly isn’t the quietest solution out there and indeed most competing units are quieter but at the end of the day the Corsair H80i makes up for this on performance. The SP120L fans it equips can shift some serious amounts of air.

There is also a bit of fan whining to compete with but as we mention using the fans via the PWM on your motherboard or simply updating your H80i firmware to the latest version can easily eradicate this.