Goodbye Corsair? Enermax Developes Revolutionary CPU Cooler

[John P. Myers]

That's really disappointing But looking at how it performed, i think i know the problem. It beat the H100 on the i7-3770K at stock speed, but lost when overclocked to 4.4GHz. Somewhere in between there, a threshold was crossed where it couldn't keep up anymore, but since it *did* win out at stock, the potential is there. I remember Z posted a report on fans for use with radiators and the fan that comes with the H100 had very high static pressure compared to the other fans they tested and likewise had the best performance. My thought is the fans on Enermax's cooler have sub-par static pressure causing the unit to fail when the amount of heat it has to remove crosses some threshold.

According to the technology they developed, this is pretty much the only reason i can think of it would fall behind the H100. But, i also think it would make more sense to buy the H100 than to buy the ELC240 and replace the fans on it because really we'd only be talking about ~2C. Still it's a very good cooler, but oh well

EDIT After reading their test methodology carefully, they state they ran the coolers in "normal" mode only, which forced the Enermax fans to run 200rpm slower than the H100 in normal mode. (1800rpm vs. 2000rpm). The ELC240 does have an overclock setting. Also, setting the H100 to any specific mode forces the fan to run at a set rpm. On the Enermax, it has sensors to change fan speed within a preset range within the mode it's set for.

One last issue, i notice on this review they list the H100 as having a fixed 2600rpm fan speed, but multiple speeds for most every other cooler. Did they actually change it a different mode as they stated?

Still, at best the Enermax fans used have a bit less than half the static pressure of the H100's fans. The extra 200rpm the H100 got during this test helped, but by how much? Hard to say...

[Fire$torm]

@JPM: I completely agree with your assessment. And no, the H100 still has 3 fan settings, not one as they implied.

Note that the Euro is now weaker then the US Dollar at 1:1.3. At the current exchange rate the ELC240 lists for $2 less then the H100. If the Dollar continues to strengthen then the ELC240 will become even cheaper. Something to keep in mind.

Anyhoot hopefully Enermax is paying attention to the reviews and can adapt accordingly.

[John P. Myers]

@JPM: I completely agree with your assessment. And no, the H100 still has 3 fan settings, not one as they implied.

I know it does I just struck me as really odd and questionable they didn't list that and only just happened to list the highest fan speed. So i can't help but wonder if the H100 was running at 2000rpm (200rpm above the ELC240) like it (kinda) should've been, or was it at 2600rpm (800rpm above the ELC240) while they pretended it was the only setting it had? Little things like this bother me