A while back Corsair managed to impress friend and foe with their all in one cooling solution : the Corsair H50. Main feature of this prefilled liquid cooling set:  a very easy to install prefilled liquid cooling unit for any case, being it a HTPC or medium tower case. Requiring zero maintenance and performance on par with the better air coolers of that moment.

One of my comments was the demand of a unit with a bigger radiator this to dissipate even more heat. If needed via a 240mm radiator, although that idea might ruin the case compatibility and the easiness of the installation. With the appearance of the new Hexacore CPU's from Intel and AMD, pumping out loads more watts then previous generations, Corsair had to redesign their H50 unit. Let's dig in and see what the Corsair engineers came up with.

The Corsair H70 Unit

 

Corsair did a very good job making the box as attractive as possible. My first H50 box was just plain white with a little tag on the sides revealing the info of the contents. The 2nd generation H50 units, with the same mounting mechanism as the H70 share sort of the same artwork as it's bigger brother.

 

 

Corsair includes all the required mountings for modern sockets. Being S775/1156 and 1366 for the Intel CPU's and AM2/3 for the AMD variants. The contents are neatly packed in a bulletproof fashion. Note that the H70 has got two 120mm fans included vs one with the H50.

 

 

 

The cooler unwrapped. Corsair still uses the same tubing, though they are a bit shorter than the H50 ones. New are the rotating/swivelling fittings on the CPU block/pump side. The used thermal paste is of good quality, aftermarket thermal paste will improve the performance only a tiny bit.

 

 

 

The Intel Top and back plate cover the S775/1156 and 1366 socket range. Just look carefully when installing the little plastic clips, that you have the correct ones installed. A closeup on the back plate reveals how corsair achieved the compatibility with the Intel sockets. Just insert the screw fitting in the correct holes and you are good to go. Below pictures are of the AMD brackets.

 

 

 

Since it's a dual fan setup out of the box, Corsair included a molex splitter to hook up both fans to the same motherboard Molex. The other two cables present are the voltage step down converters. Reducing the fan RPM from 2000 to 1600 rpm. If you don't want to use the latter you will have to use the motherboards bios to control the fan speed.

 

 

On the last picture another new feature are the rotatable hoses, compared to being in a fixed position on the H50 , it allows easier install of the new H70.

We tested the H50 a while back. Corsair had already updated the packaging going from a dull white box to the colourfull design, sort of being reused for the H70. The mounting mechanism also went through a midlife update. Now including all the mountings for the Intel sockets (S775/1156 and 1366) and the AMD AM2/3 brackets.

 

 

The thicker and slightly bigger rad of the H70 on the right. The first generation mounting mechanism of the H50 required a separate top bracket for each different socket. The new version is fully Intel compatible with the same bracket. No more screw/spring mountings either. Simple and effective is good enough.

 

 

The pump design also received a serious trim down. Being far lower and getting a nice Corsair logo on top will bring that little bit of *bling* *bling* in your setup. This time I didn't open the unit but during the testing no more gurgling sounds were observed at start-up ( so less air trapped in the loop ) and the pump speed is still around the 1400rpm mark.

 

 

The H50 unit had a PWM controlled fan setup ( so the motherboard could adjust the fan speed according the CPU temperature ) The H50  required you to hookup the white 4 pin fan molex to the CPU connector and the pump to another free 3 pin connector. With the H70, no more PWM controlled fans, just a normal 3 pin black molex.

 

The air cooler in this test is Thermalright's Venomous X cooler. Sporting 6 beefy 6mm heatpipes and an adjustable pressure mount. During all the performance tests in this review the Venomous X was equipped with the H70's fans spinning at 1600rpm. This cooler has replaced my good old TRUE 120 eXtreme.

 

 

The new AMD mount allows you to mount the cooler either horizontal or vertical. The latter which was a no go with the normal TRUE 120 included mounting.

 

Yes we still test socket 775. Many users still run these old buggers. Many P45 based chipset boards are still going strong and are powering many quad CPU's close to or over 4Ghz.

 

 

Our S775 test setup comprises of the following hardware

Mobo : Gigabyte EP45 UD3P (Bios F11)
CPU : Intel Q9550@4Ghz with 1.35Vcore (470FSB)
RAM : 4Gb OCZ Reaper PC8500 rams
Case : Antec P160 with 3 extra 120mm 1200rpm coolers ( 2 top and 1 front )

As mentioned before  : we test the H70 with 7V and 12V spinning fans ( 1600 vs 2000rpm ), the H50 stock out of the box with one fan (1600rpm), the same H50 with the fans of the H70 ( at 1600rpm ) and finally the Thermalright Venomous X with the two Corsair H70 fans also at 1600rpm.

We did not opt to test a dual core CPU. I only have the E8600 here, that CPU does 4.5Ghz at only 1.25Vcore and really doesn't get hot at all. Really no challenge for a decent cooling unit.

 

 

The Corsair H50 has to let go. The single fan unit still keeps the CPU still far away from its thermal thermal throttling point, though it performs a few degrees worse than the air cooler. Adding a 2nd fan to the H50 gives a small temp boost and closes the gap with the Thermalright Venomous X.

The new H70 comes out on top. Cooling two degrees better than the air cooler. But we have to add here that the fans were running full blast at 2000rpm. Thus producing quite some noise, totally inadequate for a home system. When slowing the fans down with the supplied 7V converters the rpm drops down to 1600rpm. The dBa output comes close again to the H50 unit, yet manages to still beat it with over two degrees. In the previous H50 review we added the noisy Antec fans, running at 2000rpm and enabling the H50 unit to perform a little bit better. As with the H70 fans this might be great for a bench setup, but for a home PC a bit too noisy.

The socket 1156 at time of writing the H50 review was still under NDA, so I never had the chance to add the data to the review. To make up for that, I now include a setup based on Intels 875K CPU. A big thanks to Tones for supplying us with this ES Intel sample. Motherboard on duty was the MSI Fuzion motherboard that the Madshrimps team won at the MSI MOA Benelux qualifier.

 

 

CPU : Intel 875K ES CPU at 4000mhz 1.35Vcore
Mobo : MSI P55 Fuzion
RAM : Gskill 4GB Flares PC16000C7
Case : Lian Li big Tower Case

 

Before we look at the results a small word on the test setup. I started off with 4.2Ghz tests with the H70. The three runs of 2 hours prime completed succesfully. But with the H50 tests I ran into trouble. Randomly one of the cores started producing errors.  Looking at the recorded temps via the Coretemp software, these shouldn't have been the culprit. Adding more Vcore didn't stabilise it. After some fiddling, I decided to rerun the tests with this CPU at only 4Ghz.

 

 

Similar picture as with the Socket 775. The stock H50 trailing its competitors, even with the aid of the 2nd fan it can't keep up with the dual fan equipped air cooler. The H70 grabbing the performance crown again. As with the socket 775 setup, slowing down the fans to 7V didn't result in a dramatic drop in cooling capacity. It seems Corsair did well to decide to include the fast spinning fans and 7V adapters. It gives the enthusiast the opportunity to decide to go full blast or lower the noise to an acceptable level to make the unit enjoyable for everybody in the house. I retested the CPU with the H70 and it was happily stable again at 4.2. Temp issue then... pretty sure it was.

 

My little Bloomfield i950, which I used in the H50 review has been replaced by a brand new Bloomfield 970 CPU. With the addition of the extra cores this CPU should be able to really test the potential of Corsair's new H70 unit. Quite interested to see how the little H50 keeps up with Intel's Hexacore monster.

 

 

CPU : Gulftown i970@4.2Ghz at 1.425Vcore ( Hyperthreading on )
Mobo : Asus Rampage III Extreme (bios 0704)
RAM : 6Gb Corsair Dominator PC12800C8
Case : Lian Li big tower case

 

 

Now this is what we want to see. With the H50 cooler , Corsair claimed over 10 degrees Celsius better cooling performance than the better air coolers out there. Our review sample was never ever able to live up to that claim, but topping the renowned TRUE was already quite good. The H70 shows its true colours now. Being able to dissipate the extra heatload of the Gulftown CPU. Not surprisingly the H50 ends dead last in its stock configuration. If it was still performing as good as when we tested it a while back , there wouldn't be the need to improve the old design would there ?

A whopping 14°C better than the stock H50 is quite surprising. Adding a 2nd fan to the H50 relieves it a bit of its heavy duty task. Yet the load seems too much for the unit to handle. The H70 takes a quite big lead here, compared to the previous test setups, the H70 comes into its own when you want to overclock an already hot running CPU, that's for sure!

Time to introduce a new AMD cpu too. Away with the X3 730BE and in with the Thuban 1090T 6 core. Which has been running happily at 4Ghz with the Thermalright Venomous X air cooler. Time to give it a small nudge and try to stabilise 4.2Ghz.

 

 

The system specs are

CPU : AMD 1090T@4.2Ghz at 1.42Vcore 2600Nb
Mobo : Asus Crosshair Formula (0055bios)
RAM : 4Gb Gskill Flare PC16000C7
Case : Antec P160, 3 120mm fans : 2 top and 1 front.

 

Small word before interpreting the temp results. Due to the weird readouts of the AMD temp sensor I re-calibrated realtemp with a +15 offset (to get sort of in balance with the bios readout), no CPU idles at 15°C when the room is 21°C ambient... so keep that in mind when looking at the graph, compare the results between the cooling solutions, don't focus on the values themselves.

 

 

Well there's not much to notice. H70 still pulling ahead of the rest, though by a far lesser margin then with the I7 setup. Two to three degrees Celcius is what was observed. As noticed before the H50 gains a bit by using a dual fan setup or fans with higher RPM. The difference between the tested coolers is close, very close indeed. I really wish AMD could get their act together regarding temp readout... Intel has some discrepancies on the cores, but most AMD's idling at sub ambient temps when being overclocked is a no-no.

Many have criticised Corsair for the way their two Hydro versions need to be mounted for optimal performance. Sucking in fresh air from the rear. Indeed it dumps a lot of extra heat in your case. Especially with the Gulftown CPU my motherboards temperature heated up by 15°C compared to a normal, exhaust hot air, setup. Take into consideration that there are two/three slow spinning top fans (1200rpm) in the top cover of each case tested here so there's still a decent airflow in my setups. Here's a quick overview of the I7 setups results :

 

 

Temps were readout via Asus Probe, during an hour prime95 run. Max temp was logged. This is one of the reasons that some case installs might not perform as good as sometimes advertised. Maintaining a decent airflow is a MUST ! Everybody knows that heat and longetivity don't go hand in hand.

 

So what to do, if you are not into case modding, if there's no room for extra fans ? Just reverse them ! What effect does it have on temps ? I only retested the H70,  in this normal air flow push pull setup, so blowing hot air out of the case...

 

 

We see a 3-4°C penalty, think everybody can live with that. Still beating the air cooler (blowing in the same direction) and H50 (in best configuration) on the I7 setup. To make up for the loss in performance : the cases' interior stays a lot cooler.

 

Last but nor least, anybody that goes into watercooling  does not only want better cooling. They want absolute silence too. We did some measurements with the GPU fan slowed down to 20% and all the case fans off. Since no fan is PWM controlled there was no need to measure idle and load conditions. time to get our beloved Smart Sensor out of its box and bring you the results of the belgian jury :

 

 

 

2000rpm is too much, it's like OCing your GPU and let the fan always spin at 70% or more... if you play with a headset, you won't mind. Though when the computer is in the living room or even in your bed room running at night, it better be silent ! For my daily rig I hooked up the fans straight to the motehrboard and controlled the fan speeds to +/- 1500rpm. It's as silent as can be and yet still cools good enough with the 1090T at 4Ghz.

Looking at the results on the different test platforms, it's clear that the new hydro 70 gives quite a a good showing. The bigger radiator and extra fan have really helped to improve the aging Hydro 50's performance. The new mounting (compared to the first generation mountings) looks a bit less rigid, though it's up to the task. Normal user will mount the unit once, though for me the new units with the little plastic clips are a bit of a nuisance. But they allow the Corsair unit to be fully Intel compatible with the last generation sockets. For the AMD AM2/3 sockets the included top and rear bracket are in the box. Mounting the unit is again 10 minute task, unless you're really clumsy. One of the key factors again of this unit: easy and hassle free install.

 

The new rotatable hoses are big plus when mounting the unit. Where the H50 could be a bit stubborn to mount, this unit almost falls into place. Too bad the hoses are still pretty rigid, but that's the price to pay when you want to avoid kinks in the cable, thus obstructing the flow.

 

 

I was initially pretty sceptical of the marketing claims at start. But once I saw a nice temp gap with the socket 1366, I knew Corsair had a winner on their hands. The new improved features really pay off. But keep in mind that the new radiator is far more bulky and might obstruct access to some parts of the motherboard. Like the H50 unit, the performance depends also a lot on the case design and airflow. On "lower-end" systems the temperature gain is visible, but not as big due to the lower heat output.

To end the article: a small warning when using any water-cooling parts for your CPU, airflow over the motherboards hot components, PWM's & co near the CPU socket, is far less and things will heat up quite a bit more. To get optimal performance with the stock components, install the unit as Corsair prescribed. Sucking fresh air in via the rear and yes dumping the heat into the case. Relying on top fans or a PSU to draw the hot air out again. If you don't want to disturb the normal case flow, you can reverse the fans on the H70 unit, but you will have to pay the price with a few degrees worse performance.

 

Would I recommend this unit for existing H50 users? Yes and no. It all depends on your current setup and how well the H50 can handle things. The H50 will fit easier in cramped cases and produces a little less noise. Its performance gets a small boost with the addition of a second fan. In case you don't have a H50 or similar yet, then go straight for the bigger brother, this of course when there are no space issue. The price difference between the two units is about the same as the price-tag of a decent 120mm fan. Why not go straight then for the all in one package! To end with: make sure to use the fan converter cables with the 2000rpm fans included with the H70, otherwise you'll not be impressed by the noise generated, the performance penalty is minimal, and your ears will be grateful.

Price tag: $100 in US&Canada / €90 in Europe, which is about $20-30 more than a high end air cooled CPU heatsink, for the extra money you get a CPU cooling solution that copes much better with higher heat loads, ideal for overclocking any CPU, even a 6-core Intel monster!

 

 

 

 

PROS

Very quick install
No filling, nor maintenance required
Good performance increase compared to the H50
Full socket compatibility (775/1156/1366 and AMD AM2/3+)

CONS

Add maybe an adjustable fan controller ?
Rigid hoses
Noisy when running both fans at full spped

 

A big thank word for the people that made this review possible, Sir Ogden from Corsair for the H50 and H70 units, Manuel from Tones for the CPUs supplied, Milan and Rogier from Asus for the Rampage III Extreme and Bernice & Sibren from Gigabyte for the EP45 UD3P