The Corsair Hydro X Custom Water Cooling Review, on a Ryzen 9 3950X
by Gavin Bonshor on February 5, 2020 9:00 AM ESTCPU Performance, Short Form
For our motherboard reviews, we use our short form testing method. These tests usually focus on if a motherboard is using MultiCore Turbo (the feature used to have maximum turbo on at all times, giving a frequency advantage), or if there are slight gains to be had from tweaking the firmware. We put the memory settings at the CPU manufacturers suggested frequency, making it very easy to see which motherboards have MCT enabled by default.
Rendering - Blender 2.7b: 3D Creation Suite - link
A high profile rendering tool, Blender is open-source allowing for massive amounts of configurability, and is used by a number of high-profile animation studios worldwide. The organization recently released a Blender benchmark package, a couple of weeks after we had narrowed our Blender test for our new suite, however their test can take over an hour. For our results, we run one of the sub-tests in that suite through the command line - a standard ‘bmw27’ scene in CPU only mode, and measure the time to complete the render.
Rendering – POV-Ray 3.7.1: Ray Tracing - link
The Persistence of Vision Ray Tracer, or POV-Ray, is a freeware package for as the name suggests, ray tracing. It is a pure renderer, rather than modeling software, but the latest beta version contains a handy benchmark for stressing all processing threads on a platform. We have been using this test in motherboard reviews to test memory stability at various CPU speeds to good effect – if it passes the test, the IMC in the CPU is stable for a given CPU speed. As a CPU test, it runs for approximately 1-2 minutes on high-end platforms.
Compression – WinRAR 5.60b3: link
Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2014. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30-second 720p videos.
Synthetic – 7-Zip v1805: link
Out of our compression/decompression tool tests, 7-zip is the most requested and comes with a built-in benchmark. For our test suite, we’ve pulled the latest version of the software and we run the benchmark from the command line, reporting the compression, decompression, and a combined score.
It is noted in this benchmark that the latest multi-die processors have very bi-modal performance between compression and decompression, performing well in one and badly in the other. There are also discussions around how the Windows Scheduler is implementing every thread. As we get more results, it will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Neuron Simulation - DigiCortex v1.20: link
The newest benchmark in our suite is DigiCortex, a simulation of biologically plausible neural network circuits, and simulates activity of neurons and synapses. DigiCortex relies heavily on a mix of DRAM speed and computational throughput, indicating that systems which apply memory profiles properly should benefit and those that play fast and loose with overclocking settings might get some extra speed up. Results are taken during the steady-state period in a 32k neuron simulation and represented as a function of the ability to simulate in real time (1.000x equals real-time).
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Holliday75 - Wednesday, February 5, 2020 - link
Was going to post this. I was like uhhhhhhhhhhh I was not planning on buying a new CPU, but at that price buy buy buy!airdrifting - Wednesday, February 5, 2020 - link
Who is paying $130 for 3 Corsair fans? lolMakaveli - Wednesday, February 5, 2020 - link
lol I have a Corsair H150i which is RGB but comes with just Regular ML fans.As soon as I saw the price for Corsair RGB fans I said forget that idea.
I payed like $200 CAD for the H150 I was not going to spend $130 on fans just for RGB.
Corsair what are you smoking.
Teledhil - Wednesday, February 5, 2020 - link
Is the World of Tanks enCore a useful benchmark? I get around 200 fps with my i7-2600k@4'3GHz and a RTX-2080. (1080p with max settings, no RTX)eastcoast_pete - Wednesday, February 5, 2020 - link
Why does the illuminated CPU cooling look like Mr. Potato Head?Tomatotech - Wednesday, February 5, 2020 - link
Because the CEO made a bet with his friends that he could release an overpriced potato head and intelligent discerning gamers will happily buy it as long as it was lit up with LEDs.Judging from the amount of clicks and comments on this article, I fear we may see more vajazzled articles on AnandTech.
Arbie - Wednesday, February 5, 2020 - link
Which is the larger factor in selling liquid cooling:• Actual need, to manage very hot chips at tolerable noise levels.
or
• Relentless hype and attention on tech websites.
??
Neither one will ever sell it to me. And - 30W for the pump alone?
Roboionator - Thursday, February 6, 2020 - link
In what world are such temperatures, i test some air coolers and custom water systems but this what a see here is from another world.....I don't see a forum that doesn't have a high tempreature thread....(3900x and 3950X)Roboionator - Thursday, February 6, 2020 - link
delta temp, all temps + 21/22 just confusingRatman6161 - Thursday, February 6, 2020 - link
Ok, I see. But we are still left with not that much cooling performance difference between the el-cheapo product and the expensive product and no indication on weather or not the slightly better cooling would equate to any performance benefits.