Corsair Hydro H100i RGB Platinum 240mm CPU Cooler

Good Cooling, But Does It Need To Be So Complex? – This is an All-In-One CPU water cooler which does a perfectly acceptable job of keeping temperatures under control, but it's a pig to install. The problem is neither the pump (which has multiple CPU compatibility) nor is it the radiator (easy mounting into standard case holes), the problem is with the wiring. Why has Corsair decided to make the wiring so complex? Usually, the pump is just connected to SATA or MOLEX and it simply pumps at full speed, circulating the coolant around the system. In addition to this, usually the fan/s (which are attached to the radiator) are connected to the CPU fan pins on the motherboard - when the CPU temperature increases, the fans speed up to pull the temperature back down. It's as simple as that.

This AIO needs a SATA connector to the pump, as well as a 4-pin connector to the motherboard. In addition to this, the fans need another 4 pin connector to the motherboard. Because this particular model is RGB, the fans require an additional connection to the RGB controller (whether it be onboard or stand-alone). After making all of the connections, you then need to configure it correctly. The pump 4 pin connector needs to be connected to the CPU fan pins and the radiator fans need to be connected to a different set of pins. Ideally, you could connect the pump and fans all to the CPU fan pins and everything would speed up / slow down at the same time, but the required connectors are not supplied to do this.

The reason that you don't want your fans running at full speed is because they make a lot of noise, but this is not the case with the coolant pump - there's no real difference in noise whether at minimum or maximum speed. I don't get the benefit of this configuration.

Overall, it cools the CPU just fine, it is just a mess to set up. I'll stick to Thermaltake next time.