Hi guys.
I wanted to update this thread with my experience on both coolers. I bought the corsair H70 originally, and while corsair is usually associated with high quality, the H70 is anything but.
The H70 backplate is cheap, thinly constructed plastic. When fitted on an 1155/1156 Intel board, it will be crooked even though the holes line up fine. The backplate also does not come pre-assembled; the bolts need to be manually inserted into the holes corresponding to the type of motherboard you are using. Furthermore, I had to bend and bow the backplate by a noticeable amount to make it fit snug against the motherboard. There are more problems I had with the bolts that I mentioned, which will be explained in a little bit.
The retention bracket is almost of equally bad quality. The bracket is supposed to set up high on the mounting screws while you insert the water block through it's grooves, but any slight nudging of the retention plate easily pushed it down the screws, forcing me to set the water block aside and reposition the retention bracket. At the same time, the backplate would not stay flush against the back of the motherboard. I ultimately had to employ my wife's help - she held the backplate against the motherboard while I used one hand to hold up the retention bracket, and the other free hand to insert the water block. Setting the motherboard against something to hold the backplate was not enough - equal pressure was needed at the 4 holes/corners of the backplate. It was seriously 45 minutes of frustration, cussing, and agonizing back pain from being bent over the PC before I broke down and asked for her help.
After I had it mounted, and after a few days use, I noticed that core 0 was staying substantially cooler than all the other cores on my CPU (9 degrees difference ) during stress testing, so I concluded that I may have mounted the water block poorly. I dreaded having to go through that mess above, but I only wish that my only problems were what I described above. Apparently, when I was tightening the retention bracket after getting the water block installed, one of the bolts slightly popped out of the retention bracket, so as I was screwing down one particular screw to tighten the bracket, I was at the same time stripping the plastic back plate. In order to get the bolt and screw separated, I ended up needing needle nose pliers to hold the bolt still while I unscrewed the other side.
After all this happened, I managed to calm myself, take a breath, and decide that no one should have to go through this kind of hassle with any pc component. I had cut off the upc code for a MIR, so returning it to newegg was out of the question. I called up corsair, explained my situation, and they agreed to give me a refund via sending me a check after I send them back the cooler. I ordered the nh-d14 and installed it this afternoon. Sadly, at idle it is noticeably louder than the corsair h70 was (equipped with noctua fans) even with the fans being powered down via the motherboard's bios control, but in my particular case the NH-D14 seems to be cooling much more effectively than the H70. At 4.6ghz, I'm hitting a high of 62 degrees with the noctua whereas with the corsair h70 I would hit 73 degrees with the same ambient temperatures. I think I will experiment with the low-noise-adapters noctua includes to see if I can get things quieter without substantially letting up on the cooling.
I've owned several corsair PSU's and ram modules, all of which have been fantastic products. But I will NEVER, EVER recommend anyone getting the H70. The installation hassle alone is not worth it, but the cheap plastic un-assembled backplate added to the fact that they pre-apply TIM (which essentially means you get 1 mount's worth of TIM) completely erodes any value that the H70 might have had were these issues not present.
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