Corsair Hydro Series H70 CPU Water Cooling Kit Review

Comparing the H50 to the H70

One of the questions that many consumers will have is how the new Corsair Hydro series H70 CPU water cooler compares to last year’s Corsair Hydro H50 CPU water cooler. The Corsair H70 and H50 CPU coolers both fit on the rear of the case where a 120mm fan goes, but the differences between the two CPU water cooling kits is rather large. The Corsair H70 is pictured on the above left, and as you can see the radiator is much thicker, the water hoses are shorter, the base plate (water block and pump) is wider and thinner, and the power lead is longer, but not sleeved. As you can see the two coolers are very different, but let’s take a closer look for those that are more curious as to what the differences are.

The Corsair Hydro Series H70 uses a 120mm radiator that is double the
thickness of the radiator on the Corsair H50. The Corsair H70 radiator
is 50mm thick versus the 25mm radiator in the H50. The increased
thickness of the radiator, compared to the H50, means that the water cooling
kit can hold more coolant and that it has great surface area.

The Corsair H50 has 12 ‘rows’ on it that the coolant flows through versus 8 ‘rows’ on the H70. The kicker here is that the Corsair H70 is twice as thick and the ‘fin’ count per square inch is higher in-between the coolant rows. The picture above gives you a glance at the radiators with the H50 sitting on top of the H70.

One of the key new features on the Corsair H70 water cooler is the low profile pump/cold-plate unit. Corsair has managed to stuff the water block and pump into a base that is just 1.125″ thick, which is amazing. The old Corsair Hydro H50 had a base that was 2.25″ thick, so Corsair was able to reduce the base thickness by exactly half. Corsair claims that the low-profile pump is high-performance and high-quality. The one negative on the Corsair H70 pump is that the 3-pin power header is not sleeved like on the 3-pin power header on the H50. The good news is that Corsair listened to community feedback and lengthened the power wire from 7″ to 13″ in length. This means that it should be easier to find a power header that is available on your motherboard or that you can route the wire through the back of your case for better wire management where you can connect it to a splitter or another power wire.

Not all the power cables were lengthened, though, as the fan power headers have greatly changed on the Corsair H70 CPU cooler. The fan header that comes with the Corsair H50 is twelve inches long, is sleeved and is of the 4-pin variety. The Corsair H70 uses a 3-pin fan header that is only 8.5″ long and like the pump header it, too, is not sleeved. We mentioned on the previous page that the Corsair H70 comes with a splitter cable that is 3.5″ long. If you used that adapter cable the overall length jumps to 12″, which is identical to the Corsair H50 fan header length. At first glance it looked like Corsair reduced the cable length, but they really didn’t. That means that the only real significant change is the move to non-sleeved cables and that the fans are 3-pin.

Here we can see the Corsair H50 on the top has much longer water lines than the Corsair H70 sitting directly below it. We aren’t exactly sure why, but Corsair shortened the water lines on the Hydro Series H70 cooler. The water lines on the Corsair H50 measure nearly 11″ long, versus the 9.5″ long lines on the new H70. By the time you figure up the smaller pump unit and the shorter water lines, the Corsair H70 is actually a tad more compact than the Corsair H50, despite the much thicker radiator.

The last difference we noted by sitting the two coolers next to each other was the aesthetics of both base plates. When the H50 or H70 is installed into a case that has a window on it the base plate will be visible to anyone looking inside. The Corsair H50 base plate had the corsair logo silk screened onto the base plate with white paint. The new Corsair H70 has a thin metal plate affixed to the pump housing that has a nicer black finish with colored text and the Corsair logo made from metal. Since the logo is cut into the metal plate it catches light (like it did above) and looks much better and more refined than the original cooler.