Overall and Final Verdict
The Corsair H80i is an impressive little package that fits in perfectly with the rest of the Hydro AIO series coolers. Bringing water cooling performance without the usual effort requires in a water cooling installation, the H80i is perfect for the budding enthusiast as well as veteran needing performance and needing it now. By far the longest part of installation was plugging everything into the Corsair Link and routing cables and even that wasn’t more of a chore than it needed to be.
Still a few design choices are questionable in the overall design. The use of two different metals in the cooling loop requires the use of a cooling fluid with less than peak performance. The Corsair Link USB cable could also be longer for easier routing somewhere beside over top of the PCI cards. The noise is also an issue both our AIO coolers seem to suffer from. It seems that the biggest trade off for lower temps is still higher sound.
The H80i set out to offer high performance liquid cooling in an AIO package and did not disappoint. A few of the design choices may be questionable and, at least for now, the noise issue seems to be unavoidable but Corsair has achieved what they set out to do with the H80i and the Hydro series coolers in general. If you are willing to trade a bit of noise for high performance cooling you can’t go wrong with the H80i.
