30 Nov 2013 – Bought a Corsair H80i liquid cooler kit for my new Haswell CPU and did an upgrade to Windows 8.1 in the process only to find out that Windows could not detect the cooler at all no matter which USB port (both internal and external) I plugged it into. Though the cooler still worked (i.e. fans were spinning and liquid was being cycled), the problem was that the fans were always spinning very high even at low CPU load causing an unbearable sustained hum.

After much Googling and hundreds of dead-ends, I managed to find a solution (source) that worked that involves modifying the registry:

“Go into the registry and look for HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\USB\VID_1B1C&PID_0C04. For each port/path string you see under this (numbers and ampersands smushed together), open the “Device Parameters” and change the FOUR DWORD settings to 0 (AllowIdleIrpInD3, DeviceSelectiveSuspended, EnhancedPowerManagementEnabled, SelectiveSuspendEnabled). Reboot.”

After making the changes, I rebooted, launched the Corsair Link 2 software and could now see the H80i. Consequently, I was able to change the fan speeds from “Fixed RPM” to “Balanced” which helped bring down the noise a little.

Hope this post manages to help someone and credit to the person who posted the original fix. And FWIW, I’m using an Asus Sabertooth Z87 motherboard.