Thanks Vlada! Yeah, I was accustomed to doing pretty standard lighting in my previous cases. Honestly I loved how my last case looked with pure white lighting. It really showed off all the little details inside the case. But when I saw Corsair's new LL series fans and how they could be programmed to look inside their new 500D and 1000D cases, I really got hit by the RGB bug! The software is getting much better. Each fan has 16 LEDs and you can literally program each individual led to create total unique patterns if you really wanted to! Im liking it. And if i really wanted to, I could set them all to a single color if the mood struck.
Not to say that there aren't downsides to RGB fans. You are sacrificing some cooling potential for a cosmetic look. RGB fans usually move a bit less cfm and run at slightly lower rpms than their non-RGB counterparts. But im not trying to break records here, so I figured I'd be ok.
I have to say that both these ML And LL series fans are REALLY quiet, even at full rpms! And they do move a good bit of air. My case temps are looking very similar to my old case, which kept everything nice and cool.
No about the difference between the 280mm and 360mm radiators. Personally, Im impressed. Corsair did improve the design of their block and their radiators in this next line of coolers. My old 280mm H110i GTX had the super loud 2000rpm industrial SP fans that moved a TON of air, but also sounded like a jet engine spooling up lol. (I personally didn't mind the noise)
I read into this topic a bit recently. Corsair did get met with some criticism for the changes they made on these new coolers. Apparently so many people complained about the noise level of last gen's fans that Corsair went with consumer demand and decided to swap out their noisy delta fans for new Maglev fans that are much more quiet and top out at 1600 rpms. Unfortunately they also have significantly lower static pressure too.
The overclocking purists who are willing to sacrifice all the fancy bells and whistles, and deal with loud fans for pure cooling power criticized them for making this shift...
With all that being said, Im pretty darn impressed will the H150i Pro. My idle temps are nearly identical to that of my H110i GTX, despite the smaller, slower, quieter fans. And the cooling performance I've seen so far has been slightly improved and tops out around the same max temps I'm used to seeing under full load. The 360mm cools a bit more efficiently through the temperature range, but as you reach the upper rpms of the these 120mm fans, the gap does start to close a bit because of the higher cfm and static pressure of the older 140mm fans.
To me, it was still a success on their part. They redesigned their pump and radiator in a way that allows for mostly equal cooling as their previous generation of coolers, but with slower, quieter fans. They tried their best to appease both types of consumers. Honestly I'd love to see how much cooling performance I could squeeze out of this this cooler if I swapped out the maglev fans for some beefier ones. I've heard of some ppl swapping them out for EKWB's Vardar fans,or other fans with high static pressure and seeing really impressive results!
Oh, one of the other benefits of their new coolers is superior pump and fan control now. You can actually program a rpm curve or run preset profiles for the pump speed, instead of it just running at 100% all the time. Supposedly this new system cools so efficiently that they even added a 0 rpm feature for the fans, where you can have them shut off completely when the system is idle or below a chosen temperature.
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