Antec Kuhler H2O 650 AIO CPU Water Cooler Review

Peter Donnell / 11 years ago

Final Thoughts

Price

In terms of value the Antec 650 isn’t expensive and at £44.99 there aren’t a great deal of water cooling solutions to choose from. Given the extensive socket support, ease of use and average performance it is about on par with other coolers within this price range.

Overview

I really appreciate the steps Antec have taken here to make this cooler so easy to use. From taking the product out of the box to having it up and running can be as quick as five minutes. I could likely install it in just two minutes now that I’m familiar with it! However the downside is that some of the engineering of the brackets, having the fan built-in and the unique pump assembly may be what keep the price at £44.99 while not directly being features that improve the overall performance.

Visually the product is a little bit hit and miss, it looks like a prop out of a sci-fi movie and I’m sure many will love it, but I think I would still have preferred the fan to be separate in some way, so that you have the option to easily mount two of your own fans like you did with the 620 and 920 coolers from Antec. Again though, this would take away from the ease of use and as it stands this is the perfect water cooler for first time system builders.

Performance could be better, but that isn’t to say that it is bad. There are air coolers on the market that perform equal or better for the same money, but it all depends on what you want from your build, how much space you have for a tower cooler, perhaps you just wanted to try water cooling in general. However I do recommend that if you purchase this cooler that you get another PWM fan and mount this with a push-pull configuration as maintaining lower RPM at higher overclocks will keep the noise down, but this does of course add a little more to your total purchase price.

Build quality is still Antecs strong point (no pun intended), everything feels robust, well-engineered and built to last and a 3 year warranty is not to be sniffed at.

Pros

Durable design
Simple to install
Unique design
Ready to use out of the box

Cons

Can get noisy under heavy overclocks
Pre-installed fan cannot be changed

“The Antec 650 didn’t blow me away in terms of performance, but it can still compete non the less. You can get a little better performance for the same money, but the build quality and ease of installation go a long way to justifying the price tag here. Beginners will be happy with what Antec have to offer, enthusiasts may want to look higher in the range.”