The Corsair H150i Pro RGB AIO Cooler Review: The Quiet Giant
by E. Fylladitakis on August 16, 2018 8:00 AM ESTTesting Methodology
Although the testing of a cooler appears to be a simple task, that could not be much further from the truth. Proper thermal testing cannot be performed with a cooler mounted on a single chip, for multiple reasons. Some of these reasons include the instability of the thermal load and the inability to fully control and or monitor it, as well as the inaccuracy of the chip-integrated sensors. It is also impossible to compare results taken on different chips, let alone entirely different systems, which is a great problem when testing computer coolers, as the hardware changes every several months. Finally, testing a cooler on a typical system prevents the tester from assessing the most vital characteristic of a cooler, its absolute thermal resistance.
The absolute thermal resistance defines the absolute performance of a heatsink by indicating the temperature rise per unit of power, in our case in degrees Celsius per Watt (°C/W). In layman's terms, if the thermal resistance of a heatsink is known, the user can assess the highest possible temperature rise of a chip over ambient by simply multiplying the maximum thermal design power (TDP) rating of the chip with it. Extracting the absolute thermal resistance of a cooler however is no simple task, as the load has to be perfectly even, steady and variable, as the thermal resistance also varies depending on the magnitude of the thermal load. Therefore, even if it would be possible to assess the thermal resistance of a cooler while it is mounted on a working chip, it would not suffice, as a large change of the thermal load can yield much different results.
Appropriate thermal testing requires the creation of a proper testing station and the use of laboratory-grade equipment. Therefore, we created a thermal testing platform with a fully controllable thermal energy source that may be used to test any kind of cooler, regardless of its design and or compatibility. The thermal cartridge inside the core of our testing station can have its power adjusted between 60 W and 340 W, in 2 W increments (and it never throttles). Furthermore, monitoring and logging of the testing process via software minimizes the possibility of human errors during testing. A multifunction data acquisition module (DAQ) is responsible for the automatic or the manual control of the testing equipment, the acquisition of the ambient and the in-core temperatures via PT100 sensors, the logging of the test results and the mathematical extraction of performance figures.
Finally, as noise measurements are a bit tricky, their measurement is being performed only manually. Fans can have significant variations in speed from their rated values, thus their actual speed during the thermal testing is being acquired via a laser tachometer. The fans (and pumps, when applicable) are being powered via an adjustable, fanless desktop DC power supply and noise measurements are being taken 1 meter away from the cooler, in a straight line ahead from its fan engine. At this point we should also note that the Decibel scale is logarithmic, which means that roughly every 3 dB(A) the sound pressure doubles. Therefore, the difference of sound pressure between 30 dB(A) and 60 dB(A) is not "twice as much" but nearly a thousand times greater. The table below should help you cross-reference our test results with real-life situations.
The noise floor of our recording equipment is 30.2-30.4 dB(A), which represents a medium-sized room without any active noise sources. All of our acoustic testing takes place during night hours, minimizing the possibility of external disruptions.
| <35dB(A) | Virtually inaudible |
| 35-38dB(A) | Very quiet (whisper-slight humming) |
| 38-40dB(A) | Quiet (relatively comfortable - humming) |
| 40-44dB(A) | Normal (humming noise, above comfortable for a large % of users) |
| 44-47dB(A)* | Loud* (strong aerodynamic noise) |
| 47-50dB(A) | Very loud (strong whining noise) |
| 50-54dB(A) | Extremely loud (painfully distracting for the vast majority of users) |
| >54dB(A) | Intolerable for home/office use, special applications only. |
*noise levels above this are not suggested for daily use
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Wolfclaw - Friday, August 17, 2018 - link
I'll stick to my Arctic 240 with its 4 fans, £75 and keeps my R5-2600 cool and quiet !imaheadcase - Friday, August 17, 2018 - link
I'm actually surprised Intel and AMD just don't ship small water AIO with retail cpu by now. I guess they are still afraid of the old "it has water it can mess stuff up" mentality.Oxford Guy - Friday, August 17, 2018 - link
AMD did that with the 9590.Icehawk - Saturday, August 18, 2018 - link
I believe Intel also offered them at one point - not very good ones though.Orange_Swan - Tuesday, August 21, 2018 - link
to be fair with a 225w tdp it was probably cheaper than building a comparable air coolernpp - Friday, August 17, 2018 - link
"The noise floor of our recording equipment is 30.2-30.4 dB(A), which represents a medium-sized room without any active noise sources."This is false and misleading, as is the whole table stating among others that anything below 35dBa is "virtually inaudible".
Really sad that silentpcreview.com is gone now, as are the days when such dubious and downright erroneous statements wouldn't have made their way into an anandtech review.
Oxford Guy - Friday, August 17, 2018 - link
My favorite example is when the same review site that glosses over fan noise later gushes about the silence afforded by a fanless PC. Which is it? Either all those fans are "silent" and "inaudible" or they're not.Tell a tinnitus sufferer about silent PC fans. It is, for instance, very possible for a person to be able to tolerate many, much louder, sounds — like air conditioner fans and car trip noise, and yet get much worse tinnitus reaction problems from these supposedly silent/quiet/inaudible PC parts.
I've been waiting many years for a high-performance fanless case but it looks like the lastest one, the Calyos, is vaporware. Apparently, the designers have moved to a new startup to create more vaporware, albeit with worse specs.
Ryan Smith - Friday, August 17, 2018 - link
So the standard that is usually quoted for a quiet room in a rural area is 30 dB(A).http://www.dot.ca.gov/dist2/projects/sixer/loud.pd...
In practice you won't find that rooms can get much quieter than that without using sound-absorbing designs, be it a recording studio or anechoic chamber.
Now if you have findings that say otherwise, we're more than happy to look at them. After all, we strive for accuracy. But what I can say for certainty is that none of our testing environments get below 30 dB(A).
npp - Friday, August 17, 2018 - link
Ryan, this a review of the legendary Scythe Ninja done by SPCR in 2005, long before they built their hemi-anechoic chamber:https://bit.ly/2MA3g5E
As you can see, the ambient SPL was 18dBA (without room treatment) and the fan did rise up to about 22dBA, which according to the quoted data should be inaudible. Of course, if the noise floor in the room is 30dBa, one could go on and state that the cooler is silent, and this wouldn't be true.
I'm not trying to argue or split hairs here, but if you want to include SPL measurements, you should take them more seriously. A room with 30dBa noise floor isn't the best place to perform such measurements to begin with and makes judgement of the sound performance of various fans highly unreliable.
Now regarding what constitutes a quite room, this is really a subjective matter. The common consensus is around 20-30dBA, I personally would call 20dBa quite enough.
Diji1 - Friday, August 17, 2018 - link
>A room with 30dBa noise floor isn't the best place to perform such measurementsFair point but it's not as though most users are going to be using the product in super quiet spaces like that.