Corsair blog

The Corsair Hydro Series H70

Last year, Corsair announced what would become an enthusiast sensation, the Hydro Series™ H50 CPU Cooler, an all-in-one solution that requires no maintenance and provides outstanding performance. A lot of you guys really like the H50 — so much, in fact, that it’s got a healthy community of tweakers, modders, and overclockers all doing their best to get the last bit of performance out of it. From paint jobs to fan swaps to guys that put custom sleeves over the tubing, we’ve seen a lot of modifications out there on the forums.

One of the most popular upgrades is to add a second fan for push-pull. Gareth wrote about it in his recent blog post.

 As Gareth shows, you can improve performance significantly by just adding a second fan. Indeed, we could have simply thrown another fan into an H50 box, slapped a new name on it, and called it a day. But here at Corsair we’re not ones to take the easy way out. So last year, right after the launch of the H50, we decided to start work on a more ambitious project: The Corsair Hydro Series™ H70. Our goal was to increase performance without impacting the wide compatibility that made the H50 such a hit.

To start with, we doubled the thickness of the radiator. Increasing the surface area of your heat exchanger is one of the best ways to increase heat dissipation in any cooling setup. By increasing the radiator thickness, we were able to boost performance without significantly affecting compatibility. When you go to a thicker radiator, it’s almost a sin to starve it for airflow. So for the H70 not only did we add a second fan, but better yet we upped their performance as well. The fans that come with the H70 up the speed of the H50 fan from 1700RPM to max of 2000 RPM. The dual fan setup gives you push-pull compatibility out of the box. For those of you who are more concerned about noise levels than ultimate performance, we’ve also included two step-down adapters to drop the speed of each fan from 2000 to 1600 RPM.

But really, the proof is in the pudding. What kind of performance benefit will you see with all these changes?

Test system built in the Corsair Obsidian Series 800D with an Intel® Core® i7 920 processor overclocked to 3.8GHz (20 x 190 MHz, 1.34Vcore), and a Asus® Rampage III Extreme motherboard. The H70 fans were configured as an intake on the rear 120mm fan location.

That’s a 13° Celsius difference at 100% load! The H50 still outperforms almost every aircooler on the market, but the H70 knocks it out of the park.

It all really comes down to choice, and Corsair gives you the power to choose what you want in your system. Corsair now has a complete cooling line-up; from the award-winning Air Series™ A50 and  Air Series™ A70 we launched earlier this year, all the way up to the Hydro Series H50 and H70 that give you increased performance, lower noise levels, and wide compatibility.

As with all our CPU cooling products, we include brackets for mounting the H70 on Intel 775, 1156, and 1366 sockets, as well as AMD AM2 and AM3 sockets.

Stay tuned to the Corsair Blog for H70 reviews. We’ll be posting them as soon as they come in.

UPDATE 8/4/2010 2:10 PDT:
Maximum PC just gave us their coveted KICK ASS! award for the H70.