Portable, Plug & Play, High-Performance Water Cooling: The Corsair Hydrocool200

The Testing Process

Since the Hydrocool200 is designed to cool both AMD’s Athlon XP and Intel’s Pentium 4 processors, we decided to conduct two entirely independent tests with the system.

In the first run-through, we checked how powerful the system was on our home-grown cooler test platform for AMD processors. There’s more information on the platform and the measurement procedure here.

We strapped a 3.0 GHz, HT Intel Pentium 4 CPU down under the water block for the second run-through. Instead of the "standard" FSB clock of 200 MHz, we ran the CPU at 233 MHz, setting the CPU clock at 3.5 GHz.

To get the processor to churn out its full allotment of heat and to stress-test the stability of the overclocked system, we ran Seti@home (client : V3.03 text version) for several days in a row.

The Hydrocool200 Keeps The Athlon XP 2400+ Icy

The Athlon XP 2400+ in our AMD cooler testing platform didn’t break a sweat under the Hydrocool200’s water block - not even under a full load. We measured the thermal resistance at 0.25 K/W in turbo mode and 0.23 K/W in whisper mode. These are top-notch ratings for what is a top-notch product. We were, however, disappointed by the racket that Corsair’s debut model kicked up. In turbo mode, the sound level sensor showed that the system generated 53.7 dB(A) ; the so-called "whisper" mode wasn’t much better at 47.5 dB(A) (measurements were taken 50 cm from the fan inlet on the case ; ambient sound level was 31 dB(A)). Corsair should really make some modifications to the fan to dampen the noise level. After all, the fun thing about a water-cooling system is how silently it runs.