Customers have made Corsair their top choice in three major categories for the 2011 Bit-tech, Bit-gamer and Custom PC awards, awarding us Best Memory Manufacturer (for the third year in a row), Best PSU Manufacturer (continuing our five-year winning streak), and the Overclocking & Cooling Award. Of the latter, Bit-tech writes: "Corsair's new range of CPU coolers, especially its pre-filled water-cooling loops, has been especially popular."

Over the past year or two, we have greatly expanded the Corsair CPU Cooler product line. One of these new additions is our new Air Series™ CPU coolers which we proudly debuted at CEBIT in March 2010. We offer two models at this time, the Air Series A70 and Air Series A50.

Introduction

Corsair launched the Hydro Series H50 high-performance CPU cooler in June 2009, and since then it has taken the cooling market by storm. It has won worldwide critical acclaim for its superior cooling performance, quiet operation, and ease of use. Installing a Corsair H50 in place of your existing CPU cooler will significantly reduce CPU temperatures and allow for higher overclocking flexibility, and will provide better cooling at lower noise levels. But, as good as the H50 is out-of-the-box, it is possible to increase its performance even further with a simple fan upgrade known as ‘Push-Pull’, which uses two identical fans to increase airflow. We will compare the cooling performance of the H50 in single-fan and push-pull mode to that of a Noctua NH-U12P HSF, also in single- and dual-fan configurations. The test system will use an Intel Core i7-870 (Lynnfield) processor at stock settings, overclocked to 4133MHz with Hyper-Threading Off (max frequency) and overclocked to 4GHz with Hyper-Threading On (max multi-threaded performance). The results, summarized below, show that the Corsair Cooling Hydro Series H50 in a push-pull configuration outperforms the standard H50 by up to 4^oC in the overclocking tests. In addition, it significantly outperforms the Noctua NH-U12P, with temperature reductions of up to 12^oC. This is a significant reduction that will increase overclocking headroom, as well as allowing for minimal noise levels while maintaining low CPU temperatures.