CORSAIR HYDRO SERIES H115I RGB PRO XT

A few years back I built my old pops a gaming PC out of old spare parts I had lying around. It’s a fairly humble rig: Intel Core i7-5820K, GeForce GTX 1080, 16GB of DDR4, all packaged up neatly in an NZXT H400i. He’s been a big part of why I got into computing, and why I even started tinkering with them to begin with, and so I owe a lot to him.

The thing is, he’s also a bricklayer and works damn hard. I mean I should know, I’ve done a bit myself as well, working alongside him. A big sideeffect of bricklaying is that you get covered in dust, dirt, and cement, and it just ruins you. It also ruins hardware, particularly coolers. And so this lovely Micro-ATX rig of his has just about killed its third AIO. He comes home from work, jumps on the PC (which is coincidentally near his hobbyist mechanic garage, where he does up old VWs) for a few games of Worldof Warships (don’t judge the man), and all that dust gets around inside the pump and eventually kills it. He’s got through three pumps so far, and it does make me laugh.

So far he’s managed to kill an engineering sample be quiet! 240mm AIO, a 240mm Corsair Hydro H100i, and now an NZXT Kraken X62. Yep, hardware-killing seems to be genetic. So what am I trying my luck with this time for him? Corsair’s Hydro H115i RGB Pro XT.

It might not be quite as flashy as the Kraken X62, but it’s a solid 280mm AIO liquid-cooler complete with some ML140 fans, an easy mounting mechanism for the LGA2011 socket, and some pretty swish aRGB as well, that I’ll probably just turn off anyway. Hopefully it’ll survive the rigors of my father’s day-to-day work life, but only time will tell.

$140, www.corsair.com