Corsair Hydro H50 CPU Cooler Review

What's inside?

Unlike the Domino ALC the H50 has no fancy LCD or pre-installed fan, you get to choose entirely what 120mm fan you want to use - just one or a pair push/pulling air through the radiator. Corsair's 120 x 120 x 25mm fan even comes with a 4-pin header for PWM control as well.

As far as this fan goes though, it's not that wonderful. The ball bearing design does the job well enough: a normal plastic quality and it's certainly not that quiet, even when it feathers down from its 1,400rpm top speed. It's certainly more audible than the pump. Our advice is to strap your favourite high static pressure fan to it if you can.

The 30cm of tubing affords enough length to angle the radiator where you want: top, back or case side panel, if you can, and the 25mm thick radiator is barely larger than a 120mm fan so it should fit nicely into all cases.


Mixing metals is usually a bad thing, but Corsair fills its H50 with ethylene glycol so there's no galvanic corrosion. Also, and we're speaking from experience here, don't unscrew it because the pump is submerged into a tiny reservoir on top of the thermal transfer area, and it holds more liquid than you'd expect. That and trying to refill it is possible from the screw in the top, but certainly not easy.

Taking the H50 apart

Getting into the H50 is relatively easy, just crack out the philips head screwdriver and undo all the screws in the base. There are plenty of them in order to keep the seal tight. Inside, the integrated pump sits in the centre while the micro channel copper block is directly underneath. And those channels really are very micro, making us question the flow rate just a little because, considering the pump's tiny size, its head pressure can't be too high.