Corsair H80i v2 120mm AIO CPU Cooler Review

Introduction

When you’re building a high-end gaming PC or workstation, it’s very likely you’ll be running a fairly high-end CPU. It’s also fairly likely that you’ll be either overclocking that CPU, or intending to use it in heavy load scenarios, such as gaming, benchmarking, rendering and other demanding tasks and that means one thing, heat! The stock air cooler may be enough for some, but air coolers can often get a little noisy when the going gets tough. Custom loop water cooling is great, but it can be very expensive and technical, which is why AIO coolers, such as the H80i v2 that I’m reviewing today come into play. They offer many of the high-end cooling thrills that come with water cooling, in a package that’s no more complicated to use than a humble air cooler.

The H80i v2 is one of the latest in a line of very popular and extensively proven AIO coolers from Corsair. It’s tuned to be well suited to high-end systems, with a powerful pump, thick cooling pipes, a thick radiator and two high-performance 120mm fans, likely more than enough for a heavily overclocked CPU. The cooler is compatible with all major socket types, but even better, it comes with a five-year warranty, that’s great piece of mind right there.

The box is nicely designed, giving you a good look at the design, as well as a quick rundown of the major features, such as Corsair Link, dual 120mm fans and socket compatibility.

The back of the box has a more detailed look at some of the hardware, but we’ll take a closer look at those features ourselves in a moment.

The mounting hardware is of a very good quality, with nicely finished thumb screws and stand-offs, a nicely finished AMD retention plate (the Intel one is pre-installed), a universal backplate and the Corsair Link cable.

The included fans are good quality and feature 4-pin PWM connectors.

The H80i v2 certainly looks more robust than the previous generation of Corsair coolers. The pipes are thicker, the radiator looking more robust, the pump housing looks bigger too.

The hoses are really nice, with a thick glossy braiding that helps protect them, but it also looks super slick and will certainly give your build a visual enhancement.

the radiator is fairly standard stuff, with a thick design and built-in reservoirs on the ends. The fin array is aluminum and the construction feels rock solid, so it should last a long time.

The side plates are really nicely finished and a Corsair badge that matches the design of the pump, giving it a nice uniform appearance.

The pump is nicely designed and has the hoses coming out of the top of the pump, rather than mounted on the side, so it should be pretty easy to install. There’s a Mini-USB port on the side, which is used for the Corsair link, allowing you to adjust and monitor the performance via the downloadable desktop software.

The Intel bracket is pre-installed, making it nice and easy to install, for Intel users at least. The copper base plate is nicely finished and should give a clean contact to the CPU. There’s some pre-applied thermal paste for those in a hurry, but we’ll be cleaning that off and applying our own Gelid GC Extreme for testing.

The fans are easy to install and with such a thick radiator and two fans in push-pull configuration, I’m expecting this cooler to shift a significant amount of heat from out test bench CPU, or any CPU for that matter.