The Difference A Little Cooling Can Make
This is a followup from the previous news article at http://www.tolon.net/2010/02/intel-retail-heatsinks-suck/
After my discovery of the state of my CPU temperatures last week I decided I was going to spend some hard earned money on a good cooling system for my CPU. I shopped around and to my delight discovered an inexpensive water cooling kit from Corsair named the H50.
Installation
I’ve always been a bit daunted by water cooling kits as visions of fire hydrant style leaks spring to mind whenever I picture myself booting up my system. The H50 however is a completely self contained unit so no fiddling about with cutting tubes and checking seals is required. Awesome!
Installation was a straight forward but those who have cases with built-in CPU backplate holes will find installing this kit a breeze.
The kit itself comes with a Radiator, 120mm Fan and the Pump/Reservoir. Two fan headers, 1x 4pin and 1x 3 pin are required for powering the unit. This was a bit troubling for me and a tight squeeze on my motherboard but I managed to get everything to fit.
Boot-up and Testing
On a clean boot-up I immediately noticed a vast drop in temperatures which were hovering around an average of 17-20 degrees celcius. Encouraged by these numbers I ran a stress testing application named wPrime and the results were encouraging. At it’s peak of 100% CPU utilization the temperatures only hit 50-55 degrees celcius, an amazing difference!
Not content there I restarted my computer, entered the bios and began to overclock. I settled on a 1Ghz overclock which brought my CPU from it’s default speed of 2.8Ghz to 3.8Ghz. I had to raise voltages to keep the system stable but I’m very impressed with the results I achieved and the maximum temperatures I receive now that my CPU is overclocked.
Overclocking
The pictures below show my temperatures in Speedfan with the 1Ghz overclock at idle and 100% CPU utilization. I’ve also included my CPU-Z screenshot.
Conclusion
If I’ve discovered one thing from this temperatures debacle and its that you shouldn’t cut costs in the cooling department when it comes to building your own system. I thought I could get away with the stock Intel cooler and heatsink when I built my Core i7 system but I was very wrong. The Corsair H50 is a great no-nonsense solution to cooling your CPU with water cooling and the results above speak for themselves.