[ad#review1038-top]The 130 watt Intel i7 is pretty warm at stock clocks, and can get really smoking when overclocked. There are many air coolers on the market that will now fit the i7, many of them work just fine keeping the i7 under control, but overclock that baby and the intense heat will bring many of those coolers to their knees.

Most of the successful air coolers are rather pricy, I own three that cost over $60, and another two that cost over $50. Combine this hot processor with the fact that air cooling it will cost more, and you’ll find the reason that many enthusiasts are finally taking the plunge to liquid cooling. Prices for watercooling a system have really dropped, and there are some self-contained coolers on the market that make liquid cooling nearly as easy as air.

Corsair needs no introduction.if you haven’t heard of Corsair’s excellent memory products you definitely need to climb out from under that rock you’ve been living under. Besides manufacturing memory products, which now includes DIMMs, the Flash Voyager line, and SSDs, over the past couple of years Corsair has branched out into PC cases, power supplies, and now liquid CPU cooling.

Today I will be looking at Corsair’s Hydro Series H50 CPU cooler, a self-contained liquid CPU cooler. Designed to just connect and go, the H50 costs only a few dollars more than an upper-end air cooler. Will the H50 keep an overclocked i7 nice and cool? Read on to see!

Looking around the H50′s box you will see a logo “Powered by Asetek”. So who is Asetek? Back in the dark ages of enthusiast computing, in 1997, when a PC was necessarily a beige box, A Danish enthusiast by the name of Andre Eriksen founded a company he called Asetek, concentrating primarily on compressor cooling and overclocking. Over the next several years, Asetek brought the enthusiast community some excellent early cooling products under the brand names VaporChill and WaterChill. The problem was that in an international market, protection of IP (intellectual property) and patents is nearly impossible for a small company designing and building products for a relatively small market, and larger companies were stealing Asetek’s ideas knowing that there would be little to no recourse from Asetek. So Asetek decided to retool and concentrate on the OEM market.

Today, again we enthusiasts have the opportunity to acquire Asetek technology and quality via Corsair and the H50. Plus we get the benefit of Asetek’s OEM experience as products entering an OEM rig must last much longer than a product designed for an enthusiast rig, considering the average enthusiast rig is used two years compared to the five or six years the average consumer rig is used. You’ll see what I mean when I describe the H50.

Specifications

Model: CWCH50
CPU Support: Intel LGA 1366/1156/775 AMD Socket AM3/AM2
Cold Plate Material: Copper
Radiator: Sealed 120mm Aluminum Motorsports Radiator
Hoses: Proprietary non-porous composition
Fan Dimensions: 120mm x 120mm x 25mm
Fan Speed: 1700RPM

Features

- Pre-filled, closed-loop system is easy to install
- Copper CPU cooling plate for maximum cooling performance
- Integrated pump and reservoir is sealed for zero maintenance and improved leakage protection
- Large 120mm radiator for fast heat dispersion
- High-efficiency, low-noise 120mm fan for drawing cool air across the radiator

Packaging

The H50 comes in a shoebox sized box.that actually is similar to some shoeboxes I’ve seen lately. I like the black and periwinkle theme. The cooler is proudly displayed on all sides.

Inside, the cooler is protected in blisterpacks, the radiator is in its own cardboard box and backed with foam.

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