Introduction
AIO CPU liquid coolers have recently had this trend of having LCD screens on their blocks. We’ve seen this kick off with the original ROG Ryujin and its tiny LCD screen but many leading brands have no employed the full pump-block as their LCD canvas.
Today we’re looking at Corsair’s take on this trend featuring a 2.1″ IPS screen on the pump-block as well as a new set of fans aimed to enhance cooling performance as well as better noise levels. These are Corsair’s ML RGB Elite series fans that provide newer look in-terms of RGB to the cooler once installed.
Arriving in both 240mm and 360mm radiator sizes, the Corsair H150i Elite LCD’s ML RGB Elite series fans as well as the standalone LCD upgrade kit alone arrive at more than half the price of the AIO by themselves alone, with the standalone LCD upgrade kit available for $99 for existing Corsair H-series ELITE CAPELLIX coolers. But for those who are just building and putting together parts, we’ll check out the Corsair iCUE H150i Elite LCD AIO CPU liquid cooler and see how it performs on the new Intel Core i9-13900K.
Read on to find out more!
Features & Specification
- A premium all-in-one CPU cooler that combines powerful, low-noise cooling and vibrant RGB lighting with a personalized LCD display, offering custom graphics to accent your system’s aesthetics and track its real-time performance at a glance..Cooling Socket Support : Intel 1700, 1200, 1150, 1151, 1155, 1156, 1366, 2011, 2066, AMD AM5, AM4, sTRX4, sTR4
- Showcase your live CPU temperature, favorite animated GIF, funniest meme, your team’s logo, or anything you like on a custom 2.1” IPS LCD screen with 480×480 resolution, ultra-bright 600cd/m² backlight, 24-bit true color depth, and over 16.7 million colors.
- A diverse library of colorful themes let you view vital system information in bold graphic display styles that suit your system and setup.
- A high-performance pump head provides powerful, low-noise cooling for your CPU, with a ring of 24 individually addressable RGB LEDs encircling the screen for even more vibrant lighting effects.
- Includes a CORSAIR iCUE COMMANDER CORE Smart RGB Lighting and Fan Speed Controller, for precise speed and lighting control over up to six RGB fans.
- Three all-new 120mm CORSAIR ML RGB ELITE magnetic levitation fans with eight RGB LEDs per fan and AirGuide technology channel airflow for extreme CPU cooling performance. Accurately control your cooling via PWM, adjusting fan speeds from 450 RPM – 2,000 RPM.
- CORSAIR iCUE software enables you to switch between a variety of display options such as fan speeds, CPU temps, images and GIFs, and more, adjust fan and pump speeds, and control and synchronize RGB lighting with all iCUE-compatible devices.
- Zero RPM fan mode and Variable Pump Speed specialized cooling modes in iCUE keep noise to a minimum when your system is idle or under light loads.
- A split-flow copper cold plate with pre-applied thermal compound and high-density stack of 128 micro-skived fins-per-inch provide highly efficient cooling at all loads.
- Cooling Socket Support : Intel 1700, 1200, 1150, 1151, 1155, 1156, 1366, 2011, 2066, AMD AM5, AM4, sTRX4, sTR4
| Cooling Warranty | 5 Year |
|
Radiator Material
|
Aluminum |
| CORSAIR iCUE Compatibility | Yes |
| Tubing Length | 380mm |
| Tubing Material | Black Sleeved Low-Permeation Rubber |
| Coldplate Dimensions | 56x56mm |
| Screen Size | 2.1″ |
| Native Resolution | 480×480 |
| Max Resolution | 480×480 |
| Refresh Rate | 30Hz |
| Fan Dimensions | 120mm x 25mm |
| Weight | 1.1 |
| Number of Fans | 3 |
| Cooling Socket Support |
Intel: 1700, 1200, 1150, 1151, 1155, 1156, 1366, 2011, 2066 |
| Radiator Size | 360mm |
| Fan Model | ML ELITE Series |
| Peak Brightness | 600 Nits |
| Display Colors | 16.7M (8-bit RGB) |
| Display Technology | IPS |
| Display Surface | Glossy |
| Fan Airflow | 14.86 – 58.10 CFM |
|
Noise Level
|
10 – 30.4 dBA |
Product Video
Closer Look – Packaging and Contents
Corsair ships the H1xx ELITE LCD in their signature full color box. Unlike previous models, there’s more details on the back because of the LCD feature highlights.
The AIO is tucked in a shipping insert which holds all the components. This is topped off by a thin foam lining to protect the parts further during shipping.
Taking out all the contents of the box we have a rather large list here with the AIO kit itself, the ML Elite fan set, the CPU mounting kit and the Corsair Commander module which will controll your fans and fan lighting, etc.
The H150i Elite LCD and all Corsair AIO for that matter releases in the last few years will support all Intel LGA11xx and 115x sockets with the new H1xxi Elite LCD series supporting LGA1700 out of the box. For AMD, since AM4 and AM5 are cross compatible, users do not need to have an upgrade kit to use the new AMD Ryzen 7000 CPUs and can directly use the H1xxi Elite LCD cooler on their AM5 motherboard. These coolers will also support HEDT sockets like socket LGA2011 and LGA2066 as well as AMD socket sTRX4 and STR4.
Included with the cooling kit is the Corsair Commander Core and multiple ML Elite series fans. For the H100i Elite LCD you get two, for H150i Elite LCD you get three and the larger H170i Elite LCD gets thrree 140mm ML140 Elite RGB fans. These fans can plug directly to standard 4-pin PWM fan headers but their RGB headers are proprietary Corsair headers.
Corsair splits the ML Elite series fans into fan power and RGB, you can use the fans by themselves and the RGB separately but that’d be stupid. The new ML Elite series fans are a tweaked version of the ML RGB series fans. These new ML (magnetic levitation) fans offer very quiet operation at low fan speed but get very audible once set to the maximum speed. Corsair most likely realized this on the Capellix line and tuned their fans. For Core i5 and Ryzen 65w systems, this means that even the H100i Elite LCD can function well on lower speeds without generating much noise.
Installation and Finished Build
And here we the Corsair H150i Elite LCD installed on the top of the case. This case is a dual-chamber design so much of the cabling is hidden in the back leaving only the large sleeved cable from the LCD block.
I am personally biased towards Corsair’s watercolor lighting effect so these fans really appeal to me. You may have your own choice of preferred effect and you can fully customize that via Corsair’s iCUE software.
You can change the lighting as well that surrounds the LCD block.
The LCD screen is customizeable with various information display besides animated graphics. There’s options to show temperatures as well as time on the LCD display.
Performance Testing
Reviewing coolers is a very divided topic so its best to always serve with as much context as possible. In our 2021 revision for our cooler testing, we will be using an open test bench to test coolers. We’ll detail this in another article as this will serve as the first test out of this revision but due to the incredible number varying cases, how they’re design and oriented as well as the stock fans that come with today’s modern chassis, there proves to be more variation in a case situation than in a test bench. That being said, much like many of our testing where we look at performance primarily, my test methodology looks at these coolers when used in the best possible scenario.
The other variable is overclocking. We previously tested coolers on fixed-voltage and fixed-frequency setups. In today’s setup, that proves to add another variable as the large array of motherboards or even the actual applications thereof will heavily vary.
Back2Gaming is proud to work with OCCT to be our partner for this test. Which allows us to set various stress loads without using mixed-load benches like AIDA64. OCCT allows granular control on the testing.
It also features monitoring and logging for troubleshooting problems and performance analysis as well. OCCT is available as a free download for all users with a paid version for power users and businesses.
Test Systems
| Test System Configuration (Intel 12th-gen) | |
| CPU | Intel Core i9-12900K |
| Motherboard | ASUS ROG MAXIMUS Z690 EXTREME |
| Cooling | As listed |
| Graphics Card | NVIDIA Geforce RTX 4090 |
| Storage | Kingston FURY Renegade SSD 2TB |
| Power Supply | FSP Hydro G Pro 1000W |
| Case | OpenBench Table Community Edition |
As a 360mm-sized cooler, the Corsair iCUE H150i ELITE LCD has plenty of cooling capacity but the new generations of CPUs are just a different beast altogether and silicon lottery as well as climate will ultimately be your best friend when you want to improve peak thermal numbers. Still, our benchmarks are quite very intense and is a demo of huge CPU workloads being cooled by our test sample. In the case of the Corsair iCUE H150i ELITE LCD, it hangs with its same-generation cooling.
User Experience & Conclusion
Corsair H-series AIO coolers are one of the first AIO brands we’ve tested and now 10 years laters we’re still the company releasing further models that aim to change the landscape. Sure the LCD concept isn’t original, but its also has been a long time coming that something like this becomes common. Its certainly not mandatory, and anyone that just wants decent cooling can pick up any of Corsair’s other cooling options out right now.
But going back to what we at hand, the Corsair iCUE H1xx ELITE LCD series features a trio of options for enthuasists: the H100i (240mm), H150i (tested, 360mm) and the H170i (420mm). Depending on your needs, the H100i ELITE LCD may be enough especially more the majority of mainstream Ryzen and Core i5 CPUs but for the top-end of the spectrum or if you plan to do some overclocking, getting an H150i or if you case permits, an H170i is definitely an option.,
Breaking things down further, in terms of performance on the famously warm Intel Core i9-12900K, our sample is not the best nor stable overclocker so I voted to keep it in stock. That said, with MCE enabled on our motherboard, this CPU can push AVX temps into the lower 100s so any cooler than can do an average of 90*C is doing a really great job.
Corsair has tuned the new ML ELITE fans to run at lower speeds to minimize noise and it does work well for the H1xx ELITE LCD as our units are audible but not like the jet engine noise that the original H100 from 10 years ago made. Users will have the freedom to override this via ICUE software and use their own fan speed setting as well change the LCD graphics and animation as well as lighting.
To bring this altogether thouugh is Corsair Commander Core which as highlighted in our product photos, requires some cable management skills to really keep it tidy. This does work against the Corsair iCUE H150i ELITE LCD and iCUE H170i ELITE LCD moreso than the dual fan H100 Elite LCD, as the amount of cables really grow with these triple fan options. If you have a dual chamber chassis or a larger chassis like the 7000X or 5000T from Corsair, then it should fit but a smaller 4000D could pose a challenge.
The new block design though cleans up very well and the LCD cable that Corsair runs from the block hides the thinner cables that’s needed by the unit. Ultimately, once built its a very beautiful accessory both with the fans and the pump block and compliments even minimal RGB builds like our test build above. Take note that the ML Elite are different from the ML RGB from the previous generation and its best to only choose one type when used via a single Corsair Commander. The ML Elite features ARGB programmable lighing which has excellent lighting.
Ultimately, if you’re after performance, the Corsair iCUE H150i ELITE LCD definitely has it as well as the larger H170i ELITE LCD variation but the key differentiator here is the fact that there also exists the CAPELLIX models of these coolers that do not have the LCD. Now its going to be hard to communicate the many possibilities of an LCD not tell you if you need it or not, because at the end of the day an AIO cooler will work with or without it. If you just need to cool your CPU then you don’t need it but if you want to add some visul accessories to your rig then you can DIY an LCD panel from modding supplies or you can have something like this.
So compared to other LCD-equipped AIO, is it worth the price? Well it depends. I am personally using an all-Corsair setup from the case, the fans as well as compatible motherboard and Corsair peripherals. Corsair iCUE software allows controlling RGB lighting from one place in such a configuration. Why you may ask? Because I dim my lights when working with videos and photos and blast the RGB when gaming especially on games with reactive lighting. Other than that, its ultimately going to boil down to your personal preference. Both NZXT and ROG have larger LCD screens but NZXT looks like the same AIO cooler since their first version and ROG’s options features a Noctua-fan option and a no-name RGB fan option. While the Noctua-cooled option is great, as our test shows, just being a Noctua won’t give you the edge in cooling and being Noctua IPP fans don’t make them any less quieter.
In closing, the Corsair iCUE H150i ELITE LCD is a cooler + accessory combo aimed at those who have few more bucks to spare to have that shiny new toy on their CPU block. Its a great performing AIO and looks great while doing it and slots into Corsair’s larger family of iCUE products that adds to the ambience of your room with no setup needed.
Corsair backs the iCUE H150i ELITE LCD with a 5-year warranty. We give it our B2G Recommended Seal!
