This spring we tested a compact liquid-cooling system from CoolIt called Domino, which was priced at only $79. Well, this seemed like a great idea to quite a few makers and today we would like to introduce to you another inexpensive liquid-cooling system. It is called Corsair Hydro Series H50 (or simply Corsair H50) and is made by the company, which is primarily famous for their wide range of memory products.

According to the developers, this liquid-cooling system outperforms a highly efficient air cooler by about 7 °C under 100$ CPU utilization (with an Intel Core i7-965 3.46 GHz frequency and 1.3 V Vcore), although they do not mention the particular cooler they actually imply here. We can easily name the competitor to this cooling system, meet with it up close and personal, test its cooling efficiency and acoustic performance and this way answer the following question: will a mass production liquid-cooling system priced at $80 outperform an air cooler? Well, let’s check it out now.

Package and Accessories

Corsair H50 liquid-cooling system ships in a dark-colored box with the picture of the cooling system on one side and the description of its technical specifications on the other:

There was a clear plastic blister inside that contains the actual cooling system and all accessories:

Corsair H50 comes with three retention kits for Socket AM2(+)/AM3, LGA775 and LGA1366 including corresponding backplates and four screws with washers:

Besides, the accessories bundle also included two brief installation manuals in six languages and one full user manual in English:

Corsair H50 is a fully ready liquid-cooling system. By “fully ready” I MEAN THAT Corsair H50 doesn’t need to be filled with coolant, because it comes prefilled and sealed. The system consists of three components: radiator with a fan, water block with a pump installed on it and two sturdy tubes, each 300 mm long, connecting the two first components together: