The Corsair H55 is a very compact unit. You will easily be able to fit it in most cases if your case supports a 120mm rear exhaust fan.
The included 120mm Asetek radiator is very nice quality and has a very dense set of fins. The H55 would respond very well to the addition of a second fan as a result of this very dense radiator which requires a lot of airflow to eek out all the performance.
I really like the new pump design from Corsair. It is much more compact and stylish than the older design.
Underneath you can see we have something of a screw-gasm going on. The copper cold plate comes with some pre-applied thermal grease. We won’t be using this in our testing for fair comparison purposes but you can expect the included thermal paste is probably 3 or 4 degrees “worse” than the high performance Gelid GC-Extreme thermal paste we use.
I am not too hopeful about the included fan. Although the dark black looks pretty good and would blend in with the vast majority of cases, it just looks too industrial to have good acoustic performance. However, let us not assume the worst, testing will reveal the true results.
The fan has no PWM support, so you can only operate it at 12 volts which is 1700 RPMs with a 12 volt to 7 volt adapter (unfortunately not included) you could reduce the RPM down to 1200 or lower.
I can’t say for sure but apparently the included TIM is of very good quality. I feel Corsair should have bundled these units with one of their excellent SP120 series fans.
I agree to an extent. It definitely needs a PWM fan, the SP120 or AF120 fans would of been ideal but even something cheaper with a lower fan speed would of just been better. I am not sure how good the included TIM is, we always use Gelid GC-Extreme because it keeps consistency and is the best TIM on the market
I’m not sure I agree with your idea of a cheaper low speed fan but I do agree wholeheartedly with your choice of TIM.
When you compare any of the Corsair or similar water cooling solutions to and equally or lower priced heatsink/fan, the heatsink/fan cools better, has lower noise and can’t leak water. Who actually buys these water cooling systems when they are inferior? It doesn’t make any sense to me especially with the know hardware damage that has happen when thes leak.
Well in my opinion the H55 is clearly offering a lot of performance here on Ivy Bridge. I understand the concerns about leakages, but what you have to consider is that if you install the product correctly and handle it appropriately, it will probably never leak. The risk is minimal but yes you are right it does still exist. As personal preference, I’d much rather have a good dual tower heatsink with 3 silent low RPM fans but AIO water loops do represent something more flexible and more compatible with most cases on the market. yes you don’t get as much bang for buck, but for some reason they are in fashion.
My plans are to buy another water cooled or liguid cooled system and as far as the price and performance the Corsair H55 would be great choice but I also have my eys oe Corsiar H100i! So I guess I got a decsion t mae! Masurering for clearnce in my csae will be the first thing I have t do to seeif the H100i will fit then I will able to decide then!