Corsair H90 140MM AIO liquid cooler review

Close loop liquid coolers are becoming more of a crowd favorite these days when it comes to aftermarket cooling solutions. These solutions are easy to install,fuss free and comparatively more silent than air coolers at the same range. Now this being a lucrative market every manufactures wants a piece of this pie. We have a product from one such company today.

Presenting Corsair H90 140MM Closed loop Liquid Cooler.

So with that aside lets see what we have in our hand today.

We will dive into the specification then a bit of photo shoot. then we will dive into performance data, so hold on..

The H90 in essence is a small upgrade to the H60 with a bigger radiator and different block. While the H60 had a 90MM rad the H90 sports a bigger 140MM rad of similar construction.

Now the specifications given on corsair website is very spartan to put it politely,which doesn’t really satisfy me. So i decided to scour the web and find details on my own. This is what i came up with.

The cooler covers almost all socket types excluding the LGA 775 on the Intel side.

The supported sockets are :

• AM2,AM3,AM3+ on the AMD side.
• LGA 1150,1156,1155,1366 and 2011 on the Intel side.

Availability : from what i can gather form a quick google search, no one in India stocks the H90 except hardwire.in from Mumbai. the price is kinda on the higher side at 7.5k INR.

but now, a few pictures of this beauty.

A little disclaimer : as you guys have seen in my last couple of reviews that I lost a bit of data in a HDD crash. Most of them were pictures taken for review purpose. this is will be the last of those reviews with low amount of pictures. I will bounce back provide loads of pictures from my next one.

As always i will be conserving my energy here.

the box came a bit distressed thanks to the awesome Indian courier service but since nothing was disturbed internally or cosmetically I gave it pas.. I will exact my revenge on them some other time. Corsair made it pretty clear on the front of the box that the cooler comes equipped with an 140mm fan not that anyone will miss it.

The back is rather uneventful.the only thing to note is the comparative graph given and the compatibility list. nothing much to write home about.

Now to  the real stuff.

Coming to the cooler itself the round head of the pump clearly says it’s of asetek origin.

The copper base comes with the TIM pre applied, its enough to cover any mainstream processor.

Testing is being done with RealTemp to measure the temperatures, Intel Burn Test to stress  CPU and CPU-Z to verify the CPU speed and the voltage being used. The pump and the fan were set at full speed through the bios.

Ambient temperature was around 30-31C. and humidity at around 45%. I didn’t use an AC since most of the users will not use an AC under normal Indian conditions. Opinions may vary but this is what i felt would help to decide the practicality and utility of the cooler under normal Indian condition.

The test system used :

CPU : Core i5 2500K @ various speeds.
Motherbaord : Asus P8Z68 Deluxe

Ram : Kingston hyper x Blu @ 1600 Mhz

Cooler : Corsair H90.

For the purpose of this test I decided I will need one more 1400MM fan to compare the and see  the capability of the stock fan. So i reached out to NOCTUA and they supplied me with an NF-A14 FLX 140MM for which i am thankful to them.

The stock fan

Noctua NF-A14

Now lets see how did the test go.

NOTE: The CPU takes 1.13v @ 3.3Ghz ; 1.2v @ 4Ghz and 1.3v @4.4Ghz.

Every load test consisted of 15 runs of Intel Burn test at “standard” test level. The system was allowed to idle for 15 mins starting from a cold boot. Every test was run thrice to come at an average.

With a toasty 30C in Kolkata we see a comfortable 33C in stock speed with the fan provided along the cooler which goes upto 39C at stock.

Now i sincerely didn’t expect the noctua to do better than the corsairs own fan. but i was pleasantly surprised to see the test results.

H90 is corsair first step towards the single and dual 1400m cooler category and as such the product does really well in some places, and in some places it doesn’t. For the sake of convenience I will keep this short.

The main motive of corsair going 140mm way was to give some competition to the NZXT kraken series, but was it worth it?
The answer to this question is subjective. if you belong to those kind of people who would like to replace the stock cooling system and apply a low to mild overclock at acceptable voltages. this is the cooler for you. but if you already have a cooler like an H60 form Corsair u better off staying with that and not upgrading.