The Art of Overcoming Cooling Conflicts: A Personal Experience with CPU Liquid Coolers

As I began to position the Corsair H80i V2 liquid cooler, I realized that my initial enthusiasm was short-lived. The tall RAM sticks would inevitably conflict with the heat pipes, causing a problem that required some creative problem-solving. Upon further inspection, I discovered that even trying to flip the cooler 180 degrees would not provide sufficient clearance for both the fan and the CPU block. It became apparent that I had to find an alternative orientation to accommodate both components.

After some deliberation, I decided to bend the heat pipes slightly to create a small gap above the Corsair RAM. This allowed me to position the CPU cooler in the desired location while maintaining sufficient clearance between the two components. However, this solution was not without its challenges. With the fan attached, I found myself struggling to find space for a larger, full-size 25mm fan. The existing design constraints seemed to limit my options, and it became clear that I would have to rely on the stock fan provided with the Corsair H80i V2.

In the end, I decided to proceed with the original plan, using the spacers in the case's mesh panel to create a small gap between the side panel and the CPU cooler. This would provide minimal clearance while still allowing for adequate airflow into the system. Upon powering on, I was relieved to find that the fans began spinning, and the system booted up successfully.

During the boot process, I noticed that the CPU temperature was slightly elevated, but not alarmingly so. As the thermal paste began to heat up and spread out, temperatures dropped, providing a welcome respite from my initial concerns. After resetting the fan curve to something more sensible, I ran some quick gaming tests to validate the performance of the new liquid cooler.

To my surprise, the CPU temperature remained within acceptable limits during intense gaming sessions, with a maximum reading of 61.62 degrees Celsius. This was a welcome relief, and I felt confident that I had successfully overcome the cooling challenges posed by the Corsair H80i V2. Through this experience, I gained valuable insights into the potential pitfalls and limitations of using liquid coolers in a compact system.

AIO Liquid Coolers: A Blessing and a Curse

In my experience with the Corsair H80i V2, I came to appreciate the dual nature of AIO (all-in-one) liquid coolers. While they offer impressive performance and ease of use, they also come with some inherent risks. When the pump fails or is compromised in any way, it can lead to a catastrophic failure that causes the system to shut down entirely. This is a stark contrast to air coolers, which will continue to operate albeit at higher temperatures.

The Corsair H80i V2 was not necessarily the culprit behind my system's shutdown issue; rather, it seemed to be a design limitation inherent in the phantek Evolve Shift case. The CPU pump block needed to be positioned above the radiator, creating a constraint that limited the flexibility of AIO designs. While this does not mean that AIO liquid coolers are inherently flawed or unreliable, it highlights the importance of careful planning and consideration when selecting a liquid cooler for a specific system.

The now-infamous Gamers Nexus video on pump placement and design provided valuable insights into this topic. Their advice to position the pump block below the radiator is well-taken, as it reduces the risk of damage from debris or other obstructions. I hope that my experience with the Corsair H80i V2 will contribute to the ongoing discussion about AIO liquid cooler design and placement.

Conclusion

In conclusion, overcoming the cooling challenges posed by the Corsair H80i V2 required creative problem-solving and a willingness to adapt to design constraints. By bending the heat pipes slightly and repositioning the CPU cooler, I was able to find a solution that worked for my system. While AIO liquid coolers are not without their risks and limitations, they can still offer excellent performance and reliability when chosen carefully and installed correctly.

If you enjoyed this video, please hit the thumbs-up button on your way out and consider visiting my store at paul's hardware dot net for a wide range of PC components and accessories. Don't forget to check out the links provided in the description below for further information on the parts used in this build, as well as a link back to the original assembly process.

In the next video, I'll be exploring [insert topic here]. Until then, thanks for watching!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome everyone today's video is uh off the cuff unplanned it just sort of popped up because i'm gonna be fixing a computer today it is a computer that i built it is this computer right here that i built for my friend chad which is why it's called the chad pc it's also fairly overpowered with the 5600x and an rtx 3080 inside however uh just to cut to the point you guys are right excellent today's video is brought to you by the msi vigor gk50 elite ll gaming keyboard featuring a sleek brushed metal top plate and fingerprint resistant matte coated keycaps kale blue switches combine mechanical precision with a lighter key actuation pressure which is great for gaming and you can use the array of hotkeys for media control or to customize the perky rgb lighting with an array of effects the unique octagonal shaped keycaps and stable anti-slip gaming base pads complete the package so click the sponsor link in the description for more on the vigor gk50 elite from msi so i built this system back at the beginning of december it was put together fairly quickly because my friend chad hit me up he's like i want a new computer i was like you're gonna have a hard time doing that right now man but i can probably help you out fantex had also just hit me up to see if i wanted to do a build in there evolve shift 2 which is a pretty cool small form factor case which goes more vertical than horizontal to provide you with a mini itx chassis that can fit a pretty solid amount of hardware including very large triple slot cooler gpus such as the rtx 3080 or a lot of the rtx 3080s now the 3080 which is a gigabyte model is over on this side and chad was worried that that was having issues at first but i'm fairly confident that the gpu is just fine in fact i think i have already figured out what's wrong with this system based on chad's description and i think it is the thing that most people were complaining about or saying hey that's not the best configuration when i first put this system together you can fit cpu air coolers in this case which is totally fine they're a little bit height limited but there's a decent amount of space in there if you want to go with an aio like this one though there's really limited space where you can put the radiator and you kind of have to plop it down here this is a corsair h80iv2 and i was able to fit the fat radiator and everything down there and it was working pretty well in my initial testing but anyone who has watched the gamer's nexus videos or the jays two sense videos on the subject knows that keeping your aio pump block unit at the top of your loop is not the best configuration it's not universally bad or horrible but generally speaking you want something up higher than the pump block usually that would be the radiator which would be better positioned up above it and that'll mean the air bubbles accumulate in that rather than accumulating in the pump block itself because air cycling through the pump can make the pump have to work harder can affect temperatures over time and can affect the longevity of your cpu aio cooler and uh even though it's been about three months since i put the system together chad hit me up and said my system just shut down and when a system just shuts down that's indicating to me something has overheated because overheating is usually the thing that triggers your system to say hey this is getting way too hot we need to just turn the system off in order to prevent any damage that is exactly what happens when cpu pumps fail because liquid stops getting cycled through the unit so as the cpu gets hot the heat just pools right here with nothing to draw it away and eventually it overheats if you've just turned your system on for the first time you might actually be able to get it up and running for a little bit but then it will overheat and shut down and then you'd be like what's going on and try to turn it back on and then since it's already hot you'll have the same thing happen to you that happened to chad which is that when you turned it back on it shut itself down during windows startup and then when you turned it back on a little while later windows started to say oh no windows errors and stuff like that because windows doesn't really like being shut down abruptly while it's trying to boot unfortunately i'm on a time crunch once again and chad really really wants to get his computer back so he can keep gaming because he's now realized what an incredible difference it is gaming on this system versus his old system but because of that my goals today are just going to be to get this system fixed and uh if the cpu cooler is dead i'm just going to be replacing it and because chad doesn't want to have to deal with me again if anything fails next time i'm going to be swapping in an air cooler we have the nhl 12s from noctua which is a low profile option and then we have the size big shurukin 3. i got both of these because i actually don't have very many low profile air coolers sitting around so whichever one i don't use i'll keep the other one to have on hand for future builds incidentally amazon just shipped this like in the box with no other packaging which i was i was like shouldn't they put that in a different box it's fine inside though so don't worry so here's what i'm going to do first power the system on and hopefully verify that this pump is actually dead second is assuming that it is dead i will need to remove this whole thing which is not the easiest thing to do in a small form factor case like this that's part of the reason why chad needed my help with this and then three of course will be installing one of these air coolers and making sure that that fixes the issue that sounds like a plan to me so let's get going doing that test boot so if you have an aio pump that has failed you maybe will experience something like this so first i do the field test if you can feel the pump and you don't feel any vibration at all there's a decent chance that that means the pump's not working second i'm keeping an eye on the temperature right over here which just started about 40 degrees and has gone up about one degree every few seconds for a while and it's getting warmer and warmer once this hits a certain point what will happen is the fan down here is going to spin up more and more because it's like cpu is hot we need to cool down the cpu ramp up the fan that cools the cpu but since there's nothing cycling through the tubes there's no heat down there for the fan to dissipate all the heat is just pulling right up there and over here we can see yep it's still getting hotter and hotter and hotter so for any of you with an aio cpu cooler if you ever have your system just shut down on you out of nowhere check this out make sure you shut down the system and wait till it cools off completely then you can boot it up just to get in the bios and then you can watch this happening hotter and hotter and hotter and this will keep going even though the computer is not doing anything that's a that's the key point right now there is no significant load on this system that would generate that amount of heat it's just the fact that it's not being cooled by the failed aio now i'm not sure if i should let it get hot enough to actually shut itself down or not uh 64c 65c yeah that's not a good idle temp especially with the with liquid cooler 66. actually kind of surprised that fan hasn't ramped up but um i did create kind of an aggressive quiet fan profile for this system when i first set it up but oh now i think it's actually spinning up now because we've just crossed 70c71 i think i validated my theory that the part of this build that i was most concerned about failing is the part that failed i hoped it would have lasted a little bit longer than this but now i can at least move forward with my repair plans so i'm going to work on the system get the aio pulled out and then we'll install the air cooler oh and now that we're getting up towards adc the fan is starting to spin up more and get louder i can hear it okay i'm gonna shut down so disassembly fortunately wasn't too tough the side panels come off easy enough and i had a reasonable access to the 120 millimeter all-in-one cooler and i was able to pull that out fortunately no rgb on that meant fewer cables to unplug now it's over there with my other failed all-in-one liquid cooler is this a trend you got a trend going on for the air cooler though i did a post online a poll both on twitter and on youtube and a bunch of you guys voted thank you for doing that and you all overwhelmingly chose the noctua nhl 12s so sorry said shuruken3 uh we'll we'll use you in a different build let's pull the parts out for this though i'm thinking to myself i'm going to be a smart because there's a backplate here universal m4 back plate that the existing all-in-one cooler used and i don't want to have to get back at the back side of this motherboard because the graphics card is back there and if i don't have to uninstall that and that's a little bit less work i have to do so by leaving a couple mounts on from the corsair h80i i can then reinstall the mounts for the new noctua nhl12s and hopefully i won't have to get at the back plate to worry about that but then i realized oh yeah there's two different sets of mounting brackets for this cooler because there's a couple different ways you can orient it horizontal or vertical basically depending on which way you want the fin stacks to go and you would want the fin stacks to promote airflow across them this way where air would flow a little bit better rather than this way which would be blocked so first i thought oh it's a tall case and there's an intake at the bottom so i want air to flow vertically and i want it that way but then i realized oh yeah there's also a fan right here that is an exhaust and this compartment up here is a little bit separate from the bottom of the case anyway so i think i'd be okay with it this way but then i started positioning it and i realized oh yeah i've got some tall corsair ram so these heat pipes conflict with it if i put it that way the end of the cooler conflicts with the fan if i try to put it that way likewise those pipes conflict with this fan if i try to flip it 180 from there so really the only way it's going to fit in here is this orientation and i actually had to even you can bend these heat pipes just a little bit and i did that just so it would have clearance on top of the corsair ram so i'm fairly sure that will work but then you know i i want the fan attached here and i was thinking there might be enough space to put like a full size 25 millimeter like an nf a12 a25 whatever it's called i was thinking maybe i could fit one of those but honestly you know our clearance here is already getting pretty close but maybe that's a good thing because this is the fan that it comes with it comes under mounted to be a more slim solution but for that you definitely need shorter ram but if i put it like that then it'll be an intake maybe right up against the side panel and if the side panel fits well then i think there will be minimal clearance and the sort of spacers here across this mesh actually provide a little bit of gap there as well but that should get tons of fresh air right there so i think this is the configuration i'm gonna go with and i just powered on again and uh the fans started spinning we started booting it does not appear to be hitting the side panel here even if i push a little bit it seems all right and hey we've booted into the operating system and we can see our cpu temperature here a little on the warm side in the 50s but we just put it up and i just ran this and it's still doing boot up stuff and downloading things so it's actually working right now and we can see we are hitting like 4.6 4.65 gigahertz on the cpu which is uh what it should be doing and our cpu temperatures might drop a little bit as that thermal paste starts to heat up and spread out ah i've determined why those cpu temperatures are a little bit on the high side and that's because i set a pretty aggressive fan curve including a zero fan mode up to a certain amount here when i set this up but that was assuming that there was going to be a pump cycling water across the cpu and that was just the fan curve for the fan down there that was against the radiator so i'm going to reset this to something a little bit more sensible and keep the fan on most of the time and that should help temperatures and just to do a quick gaming test here now that the cpu cooler is upgraded i have jumped into world of warcraft onto chad's onto chad's tune called kuchi monster because of course it is and we seem to be doing just fine maximum cpu temperature is what i'm looking at here and we're not getting above 61.62 so that's looking good to me and i think we can call this a successful fix of chad's pc that was shutting down by itself so what have we learned today aio liquid coolers are both a blessing and a curse because when they do fail when the pump fails it can cause your system to just shut itself off whereas with an air cooler if you have the fan fail the heat sink and the heat pipes are still going to keep functioning so you'll end up with a warmer cpu but it's not going to be as dire a situation as an aio with a failed pump i don't think it was necessarily the fault of the corsair h80i v2 i think it was more of the design of the phantek's evolve shift to and the fact that you just naturally have to have the cpu pump block up above the radiator that doesn't mean you can't do an aio in this case but you probably want to have a differently designed one like for example the nzxt ones that have the pump actually in the radiator itself so that would keep it at a lower point in the loop we did get some further validation of the now infamous gamers nexus video talking about where your pump and block should be in relation to the rest of your loop so hopefully this sort of adds to that pile guys if you enjoyed this video though definitely hit thumbs up button on your way out and i'll put links to the parts i used as well as a link back to this original build if you want to check out the assembly process thanks again for watching check out my store while you're on your way out at paul's hardware dot net shirts mugs pint glasses thumbscrew logos yay and we'll see you guys in the next videowelcome everyone today's video is uh off the cuff unplanned it just sort of popped up because i'm gonna be fixing a computer today it is a computer that i built it is this computer right here that i built for my friend chad which is why it's called the chad pc it's also fairly overpowered with the 5600x and an rtx 3080 inside however uh just to cut to the point you guys are right excellent today's video is brought to you by the msi vigor gk50 elite ll gaming keyboard featuring a sleek brushed metal top plate and fingerprint resistant matte coated keycaps kale blue switches combine mechanical precision with a lighter key actuation pressure which is great for gaming and you can use the array of hotkeys for media control or to customize the perky rgb lighting with an array of effects the unique octagonal shaped keycaps and stable anti-slip gaming base pads complete the package so click the sponsor link in the description for more on the vigor gk50 elite from msi so i built this system back at the beginning of december it was put together fairly quickly because my friend chad hit me up he's like i want a new computer i was like you're gonna have a hard time doing that right now man but i can probably help you out fantex had also just hit me up to see if i wanted to do a build in there evolve shift 2 which is a pretty cool small form factor case which goes more vertical than horizontal to provide you with a mini itx chassis that can fit a pretty solid amount of hardware including very large triple slot cooler gpus such as the rtx 3080 or a lot of the rtx 3080s now the 3080 which is a gigabyte model is over on this side and chad was worried that that was having issues at first but i'm fairly confident that the gpu is just fine in fact i think i have already figured out what's wrong with this system based on chad's description and i think it is the thing that most people were complaining about or saying hey that's not the best configuration when i first put this system together you can fit cpu air coolers in this case which is totally fine they're a little bit height limited but there's a decent amount of space in there if you want to go with an aio like this one though there's really limited space where you can put the radiator and you kind of have to plop it down here this is a corsair h80iv2 and i was able to fit the fat radiator and everything down there and it was working pretty well in my initial testing but anyone who has watched the gamer's nexus videos or the jays two sense videos on the subject knows that keeping your aio pump block unit at the top of your loop is not the best configuration it's not universally bad or horrible but generally speaking you want something up higher than the pump block usually that would be the radiator which would be better positioned up above it and that'll mean the air bubbles accumulate in that rather than accumulating in the pump block itself because air cycling through the pump can make the pump have to work harder can affect temperatures over time and can affect the longevity of your cpu aio cooler and uh even though it's been about three months since i put the system together chad hit me up and said my system just shut down and when a system just shuts down that's indicating to me something has overheated because overheating is usually the thing that triggers your system to say hey this is getting way too hot we need to just turn the system off in order to prevent any damage that is exactly what happens when cpu pumps fail because liquid stops getting cycled through the unit so as the cpu gets hot the heat just pools right here with nothing to draw it away and eventually it overheats if you've just turned your system on for the first time you might actually be able to get it up and running for a little bit but then it will overheat and shut down and then you'd be like what's going on and try to turn it back on and then since it's already hot you'll have the same thing happen to you that happened to chad which is that when you turned it back on it shut itself down during windows startup and then when you turned it back on a little while later windows started to say oh no windows errors and stuff like that because windows doesn't really like being shut down abruptly while it's trying to boot unfortunately i'm on a time crunch once again and chad really really wants to get his computer back so he can keep gaming because he's now realized what an incredible difference it is gaming on this system versus his old system but because of that my goals today are just going to be to get this system fixed and uh if the cpu cooler is dead i'm just going to be replacing it and because chad doesn't want to have to deal with me again if anything fails next time i'm going to be swapping in an air cooler we have the nhl 12s from noctua which is a low profile option and then we have the size big shurukin 3. i got both of these because i actually don't have very many low profile air coolers sitting around so whichever one i don't use i'll keep the other one to have on hand for future builds incidentally amazon just shipped this like in the box with no other packaging which i was i was like shouldn't they put that in a different box it's fine inside though so don't worry so here's what i'm going to do first power the system on and hopefully verify that this pump is actually dead second is assuming that it is dead i will need to remove this whole thing which is not the easiest thing to do in a small form factor case like this that's part of the reason why chad needed my help with this and then three of course will be installing one of these air coolers and making sure that that fixes the issue that sounds like a plan to me so let's get going doing that test boot so if you have an aio pump that has failed you maybe will experience something like this so first i do the field test if you can feel the pump and you don't feel any vibration at all there's a decent chance that that means the pump's not working second i'm keeping an eye on the temperature right over here which just started about 40 degrees and has gone up about one degree every few seconds for a while and it's getting warmer and warmer once this hits a certain point what will happen is the fan down here is going to spin up more and more because it's like cpu is hot we need to cool down the cpu ramp up the fan that cools the cpu but since there's nothing cycling through the tubes there's no heat down there for the fan to dissipate all the heat is just pulling right up there and over here we can see yep it's still getting hotter and hotter and hotter so for any of you with an aio cpu cooler if you ever have your system just shut down on you out of nowhere check this out make sure you shut down the system and wait till it cools off completely then you can boot it up just to get in the bios and then you can watch this happening hotter and hotter and hotter and this will keep going even though the computer is not doing anything that's a that's the key point right now there is no significant load on this system that would generate that amount of heat it's just the fact that it's not being cooled by the failed aio now i'm not sure if i should let it get hot enough to actually shut itself down or not uh 64c 65c yeah that's not a good idle temp especially with the with liquid cooler 66. actually kind of surprised that fan hasn't ramped up but um i did create kind of an aggressive quiet fan profile for this system when i first set it up but oh now i think it's actually spinning up now because we've just crossed 70c71 i think i validated my theory that the part of this build that i was most concerned about failing is the part that failed i hoped it would have lasted a little bit longer than this but now i can at least move forward with my repair plans so i'm going to work on the system get the aio pulled out and then we'll install the air cooler oh and now that we're getting up towards adc the fan is starting to spin up more and get louder i can hear it okay i'm gonna shut down so disassembly fortunately wasn't too tough the side panels come off easy enough and i had a reasonable access to the 120 millimeter all-in-one cooler and i was able to pull that out fortunately no rgb on that meant fewer cables to unplug now it's over there with my other failed all-in-one liquid cooler is this a trend you got a trend going on for the air cooler though i did a post online a poll both on twitter and on youtube and a bunch of you guys voted thank you for doing that and you all overwhelmingly chose the noctua nhl 12s so sorry said shuruken3 uh we'll we'll use you in a different build let's pull the parts out for this though i'm thinking to myself i'm going to be a smart because there's a backplate here universal m4 back plate that the existing all-in-one cooler used and i don't want to have to get back at the back side of this motherboard because the graphics card is back there and if i don't have to uninstall that and that's a little bit less work i have to do so by leaving a couple mounts on from the corsair h80i i can then reinstall the mounts for the new noctua nhl12s and hopefully i won't have to get at the back plate to worry about that but then i realized oh yeah there's two different sets of mounting brackets for this cooler because there's a couple different ways you can orient it horizontal or vertical basically depending on which way you want the fin stacks to go and you would want the fin stacks to promote airflow across them this way where air would flow a little bit better rather than this way which would be blocked so first i thought oh it's a tall case and there's an intake at the bottom so i want air to flow vertically and i want it that way but then i realized oh yeah there's also a fan right here that is an exhaust and this compartment up here is a little bit separate from the bottom of the case anyway so i think i'd be okay with it this way but then i started positioning it and i realized oh yeah i've got some tall corsair ram so these heat pipes conflict with it if i put it that way the end of the cooler conflicts with the fan if i try to put it that way likewise those pipes conflict with this fan if i try to flip it 180 from there so really the only way it's going to fit in here is this orientation and i actually had to even you can bend these heat pipes just a little bit and i did that just so it would have clearance on top of the corsair ram so i'm fairly sure that will work but then you know i i want the fan attached here and i was thinking there might be enough space to put like a full size 25 millimeter like an nf a12 a25 whatever it's called i was thinking maybe i could fit one of those but honestly you know our clearance here is already getting pretty close but maybe that's a good thing because this is the fan that it comes with it comes under mounted to be a more slim solution but for that you definitely need shorter ram but if i put it like that then it'll be an intake maybe right up against the side panel and if the side panel fits well then i think there will be minimal clearance and the sort of spacers here across this mesh actually provide a little bit of gap there as well but that should get tons of fresh air right there so i think this is the configuration i'm gonna go with and i just powered on again and uh the fans started spinning we started booting it does not appear to be hitting the side panel here even if i push a little bit it seems all right and hey we've booted into the operating system and we can see our cpu temperature here a little on the warm side in the 50s but we just put it up and i just ran this and it's still doing boot up stuff and downloading things so it's actually working right now and we can see we are hitting like 4.6 4.65 gigahertz on the cpu which is uh what it should be doing and our cpu temperatures might drop a little bit as that thermal paste starts to heat up and spread out ah i've determined why those cpu temperatures are a little bit on the high side and that's because i set a pretty aggressive fan curve including a zero fan mode up to a certain amount here when i set this up but that was assuming that there was going to be a pump cycling water across the cpu and that was just the fan curve for the fan down there that was against the radiator so i'm going to reset this to something a little bit more sensible and keep the fan on most of the time and that should help temperatures and just to do a quick gaming test here now that the cpu cooler is upgraded i have jumped into world of warcraft onto chad's onto chad's tune called kuchi monster because of course it is and we seem to be doing just fine maximum cpu temperature is what i'm looking at here and we're not getting above 61.62 so that's looking good to me and i think we can call this a successful fix of chad's pc that was shutting down by itself so what have we learned today aio liquid coolers are both a blessing and a curse because when they do fail when the pump fails it can cause your system to just shut itself off whereas with an air cooler if you have the fan fail the heat sink and the heat pipes are still going to keep functioning so you'll end up with a warmer cpu but it's not going to be as dire a situation as an aio with a failed pump i don't think it was necessarily the fault of the corsair h80i v2 i think it was more of the design of the phantek's evolve shift to and the fact that you just naturally have to have the cpu pump block up above the radiator that doesn't mean you can't do an aio in this case but you probably want to have a differently designed one like for example the nzxt ones that have the pump actually in the radiator itself so that would keep it at a lower point in the loop we did get some further validation of the now infamous gamers nexus video talking about where your pump and block should be in relation to the rest of your loop so hopefully this sort of adds to that pile guys if you enjoyed this video though definitely hit thumbs up button on your way out and i'll put links to the parts i used as well as a link back to this original build if you want to check out the assembly process thanks again for watching check out my store while you're on your way out at paul's hardware dot net shirts mugs pint glasses thumbscrew logos yay and we'll see you guys in the next video\n"