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Corsair Cooling Hydro Series H50 CPU Cooler

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Corsair continues its trend of offering excellent products at decent prices

Corsair is best known for its memory and power supplies, but recently the company has taken to rebadging excellent OEM products for retail. First came a rebadged edition of Samsung’s blazing-fast 256GB MLC solid state drive. Now Corsair is continuing the trend by scooping up Asetek’s all-in-one liquid CPU cooler and rebranding it as the Corsair Cooling Hydro Series H50. It’s not just a straight-up rebadge. According to Corsair, it worked with Asetek to modify the latter’s OEM-only version, adopting a universal design and reportedly improving performance. We can’t verify how Corsair’s H50 compares to the OEM version, as the OEM version isn’t available for consumer purchase.

We were more interested to see how the H50 did against CoolIt’s similarly priced Domino (reviewed June 2009). Like the Domino, the Corsair H50 consists of a CPU heat exchanger/pump unit that fits atop the CPU and is connected to a radiator, which mounts in place of your case’s rear 12cm fan. The H50 includes its own 12cm fan, which sits between the radiator and the case wall and pulls air through the radiator fins. The pump uses a three-pin power lead, which needs to plug into the CPU fan power port on the motherboard, and the 12cm fan, confusingly, has a four-pin connector, which plugs into any other fan control port. We originally tried running the pump off a direct-power Molex and the fan off the CPU PWM port, but saw miserable performance. Only after reversing the two did we achieve the expected performance.


The Corsair H50 is quiet, classy, maintenance-free, and gets the job done.

The heat exchanger mounts to the mother-board using a backplate/clamp mechanism, which is held on by spring screws. It’s not the easiest install we’ve ever undertaken, and the fact that the pump is permanently attached to the radiator means you’ll be dealing with that bit of inconvenience during the whole process, but it’s not terribly arduous, either.

Once installed, the H50 performed admirably. Unlike the CoolIt Domino, there’s no rpm monitor or adjustable-speed fans (unless you control yours from the motherboard), but the H50 performs extremely well (and quietly) on its single setting. The H50 lowered full-burn temperatures nearly 35 degrees from the stock cooler, and almost five degrees below the Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme, our champion air cooler (reviewed July 2009). Idle temps were barely two degrees higher than with the Thermalright, but still nearly 15 degrees cooler than stock.

The Corsair H50 retails for $80—comparable to the CoolIt and most of our favorite air coolers. It’s quiet, classy, and works like a charm.

Corsair Cooling Hydro Series H50
h20

Quiet; great cooling; competitively priced; no-maintenance closed-loop cooling.

h2so4

Idle temps could be lower; install could be easier.

score:9ka
Benchmarks

Corsair H50
Thermalright U120-E
Stock Cooler
Idle (C) 31.25
29.25 44.75
100% Burn (C) 40 44.5 73.75
Best scores are bolded. Idle temperatures were measured after an hour of inactivity; load temperatures were measured after an hour's worth of CPU Burn-in (four instances). Test system consists of a stock-clock Q6700 processor on an EVGA 680i motherboard inside a Cooler Master ATCS 840 case with stock fans.
COMMENTS
avatarYour kidding right?

I'm sorry but to say a the H20 system beats a True on a stock Q6700 is not a legitimate review.  The name of the site is Maximum PC, not Minimum PC.  Overclock that Q6700 t0 3.6 GHz or higher then report the results.  That's where the True and any other high end cooler shines, at high voltage Overclocks, not at stock.

I'd bet money that 120mm rad couldn't handle a 3.6 GHz OC.  Guess we won't know though.

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avatarWow, took a while, but it

Wow, took a while, but it finally came as requested, a review of the H50...

 

I've seen a LOT of coolers, and there are some that are better even on air, and even some high end liquid cooling solutions that aren't as good as what's available in the H50. This isn't to say it's the end-all and be-all of coolers, because it's not.

 

The H50 is for those that want to dip their toes into water cooling, but don't want to dive into the deep end all at once. It -IS- a very good cooler, make no bones about it, and for the vast majority of people it will quite easily do whatever you need it for with EASE, and even low to well into the mid-range overclocking.

 

If you're someone on the furthest fringes of overclocking, then of course you already have an answer and it's likely superior to the H50, but at the considerable cost of relative simplicity and ease of use.

 

For what it is, the H50 is AMONG the tip top coolers right now (not that I needed MaxPC to tell me, but it's nice they too have reviewed it). So while the testing methodology may be "wanting", the results are definitely good and with a push-pull fan it would have trounced the U120, even with it using a push pull of its own.

 

Now of course the caveats, if you already have a good air cooling methodology, the H50 does NOT warrant an upgrade because you're already nearly certain to not necessitate any additional cooling capability to begin with. If you -want it-, then buy it on those grounds, but don't do so under the mistaken belief that you HAVE to have it because you don't.

If you're about to build a new system, and plan to push your shiny new processor hard and fast, then the H50 is definitely a VERY strong contender for cheap, (relatively) easy, and extremely capable solutions available. Let it be known, other coolers can very easily be more friendly to install, but once it's in you're likely to not need to worry about it ever again anyway. So unless you're crunched for time, a little extra patience and a few more steps are hardly anything to be upset by, and anyone planning on using such a cooling method likely has a full tower anyway (Micro-ATX need not apply).

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avatarSo which of the H50 or Domino is better?

"We were more interested to see how the H50 did against CoolIt’s similarly priced Domino (reviewed June 2009). "

It would have been useful if you actually *had* compared the H50 against the Domino.  Since you didn't and since there aren't any test system specs posted in the Domino article, there's no way of telling if the test systems used to evaluate the H50 and the Domino were the same.  If not, then the temps from each article cannot be compared against one another - making it really difficult (actually, impossible) to tell which cooler performed better.

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avatarI really like you guys at

I really like you guys at Max PC, but why is it that every other review I've seen of this been 10C higher In both tests? Now I understand that some config things could be different but it looks to be virtually the same. I might have to call B.S. on this review. I love Corsair products and did some extensive research on this product, and this review seems a little suspect to me. No flamers please

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avatarpossible

They did mention something about swapping the 3 pin plug with the molex connector and getting terrible results. I don't know how easy of a mistake that is to make since I have no first hand experience with the product, but it is possible that other sites have made the mistake and not realized it.

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