Installation

This is far from Corsair's first foray into liquid coolers, and it shows because installing the iCUE H115i RGB ELITE is an incredibly easy process. To start with on Socket AM4, you will need to remove the preinstalled Intel brackets and replace them with the AMD brackets. To do this, simply slide them apart, and they will come free from the pump block. Then slide the two AMD brackets into place.


With the pump block ready to go, you now need to prepare the motherboard. This requires removing the default AMD plastic brackets, after which you then secure the AMD backplate to the motherboard with Corsair's AMD standoffs.


The motherboard backplate is now secure; you can either clean the pump off and apply your own thermal paste as I have here, or use the pre-applied paste from Corsair. Either way, with everything ready to go, slide the pump onto the standoffs and then secure it with the four thumb nuts.


The last step is to attach the radiator to the chassis along with the fans, and then plug everything in. As this is a Corsair AIO and it makes use of their iCUE software, you will need to connect the wiring harness to the pump block and then plug it into a USB header on the motherboard. Once you boot the system, you can download and install the iCUE software, which will let you customize the LED lighting along with the fan curve and pump speeds.

Overall, the installation is pretty straightforward on AMD and Intel. Due to the usage of threaded standoffs on all platforms, you don't need to grow a third or fourth hand to make it easier. Instead, everything is so simple that it requires very little effort on the end user's part.