Our quest to find an advantage—any advantage—in today’s maintenance-free compact liquid coolers began with CoolIT’s Domino A.L.C. sealed liquid system and the low-cost Cogage True Spirit 120mm tower. Unfortunately, the liquid cooler only performed as well as the air cooler when its custom-wired fan was forced to operate at its maximum speed of 2,800 RPM, versus the air cooler’s maximum fan speed of 1,600 RPM. The enormous increase in cost and noise for sub-par cooling performance put the Domino A.L.C. at an equally big disadvantage compared to the simpler sink and fan.
Our quest continued with Corsair’s H50 sealed-liquid system and Rosewill’s FORT120 air-cooling tower, where the air cooler’s fast 2,400 RPM fan gave it a cooling advantage comparable to its resulting acoustic disadvantage. Readers complained that the tradeoff between cooling and noise could only be addressed by using the same fan on both coolers, while Corsair pointed out that we weren't using the configuration the way it was designed, blowing cooler air through the radiator. In contrast, air coolers must typically use warm case air to cool the processor, which is a disadvantage not properly reflected on an open bench. End users typically don’t run open systems, and the H50 was designed to use the case advantageously.

This leaves us with a few additional configurations to test. How much better will the Corsair H50 and the Cogage True Spirit function with Rosewill’s FORT120 more powerful fan? How much worse will the Cogage True Spirit and Rosewill FORT120 perform in a closed system? Today we test each configuration inside a traditional oversized mid-tower case, using two different fan configurations for each unit.
Get ready. All of your questions are about to be answered.
Water offers lower noise @ a slightly less extreme overclock, but who runs 4.0Ghz plus everyday.
kinda proves that when your going water cooling, do it PROPERLY not a pre made kit
if i was to do water cooling, i would go all the way with a modded car radiator, drum for a water sump and a few powerful decent sized pumps to start off with to keep everything sweet, none of this "barely better then stock" bs.
Good article though, your best articles are when you take the time to answer these odd questions that are commonly asked by the enthusiast.
I have an old-style Antec SLK-B case with a side-port fan (intake) that blows air into and through two push-pull 1500 RPM fans with the H50 radiator sandwiched in-between; these fans blow out, not in. The temp drop from a single fan to dual fans is around 7c degrees.
The biggest advantage of the H50 is noise, or lack thereof. My Tenma sound meter records less than 30db within 1ft of the case. Can't say that for any of the other HSFs I've tried (mostly stock).
Air can be very quiet, but it requires that you keep fan speeds low. A good 120 mm fan running at 1000 rpm or less is just about inaudible, but such low speeds mean you can't overclock a whole lot. I'd guess based on my experience that you wouldn't want to pump more than about 150-160 W through a decent 120 mm tower heatsink like the ones used in the review if you keep the fans
IMO you should be able to build a custom water setup in that case. Custom water will cool much better than the h50 anyday. Will it cost more than the h50? Yes but if you're gonna do water do water, these little prebuilt kits really don't cut it when comes to shedding heat or noise levels
Yep, I started out with a little pre-built kit but now I use a custom built loop to cool my CPU and northbridge/southbridge. Keeps the temp way way down on both. I have a 780i and the northbridge & southbridge have terrible stock cooling and the CPU is a quad core overclocked to 3.75GHz and it still stays icy cold.