Can the big brother do everything better? – Corsair iCUE XC7 RGB Elite LCD water block review including teardown and test loop 2.0

1 - Intro and test loop 2.0 2 - Unboxing Corsair XC7 RGB Elite LCD 3 - Teardown and comparison with XC7 Pro 4 - iCUE software options 5 - Performance LGA1700 – Intel Core i9-13900KF 6 - Performance AM5 – AMD Ryzen 9 7950X 7 - WLP-Abdrücke und Montage-Erfahrungen 8 - Lessons learned, summary and conclusion

Performance AM5 – AMD Ryzen 9 7950X

The clock and voltage settings also remained the same on AM5 with approx. 280 W constant power consumption or waste heat in Prime 95 with in-place FFT Size 200. And as in the previous test with Loop 1.0, the water blocks with offset mounting to the “south” relative to the CPU have an advantage due to the positioning directly above the compute CCDs. Unfortunately, the entire test series had to be repeated after plausibility tests. This is because once the CPU had been uninstalled from the board, it probably needed a few days or test cycles to deform to its maximum concave shape. Accordingly, blocks tested at the beginning performed unfairly better, sometimes 5 K better than in the previous test. in the end, it took 40 test cycles to obtain consistent, plausible data, which was one of the reasons for the delay in the test.

Depending on the flow rate, Alphacool Core 1 with the “AM5 Performance Kit” and the Aquacomputer cuplex kryos NEXT, which was converted from LGA1700 to AM5 using a conversion kit (4260473313007), share first place. The kryos NEXT only has the offset with this conversion kit. If you buy a native kryos NEXT for AM5, it is centered and without offset. You can find more details about the conversion in the first part.

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The XC7 Elite LCD is 1 to 2 Kelvin behind its little XC7 Pro brother. However, it should not be forgotten that we only tested the very best blocks in today’s test and the XC7 Elite is therefore effectively in the middle of the performance field.

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The offset mount of the Aquacomputer and Alphacool blocks also pays off in the temperature differences between the hottest and coolest core. The other 3 blocks are not much different, although the XC7 Pro again has a slight advantage.

I don’t want to withhold the new metric of the inlet-outlet delta of the water temperature from you on the AMD CPU either, even if it’s not really reliable or meaningful yet. A follow-up with a constant flow rate instead of a constant pump speed could make the metric more meaningful. However, since the temperature difference is strongly dependent on the flow rate and this in turn on the back pressure of the water block (see previous page), please take this diagram with a large grain of salt.