Testing
First let me mention that I never heard the H50’s fan, it remained silent during all testing. I never heard the pump either.
I compared the H50 against two coolers. I felt that I should compare the H50 against a nice air cooler, since that is what the H50 is really marketed against, and also a liquid cooling system, just to see how the self-contained system compares to the “real thing”. Representing air cooling, I used the 120mm Zalman CNPS 10X Extreme, the best performing and most expensive cooler I’ve owned. It costs about $8 less than the H50 and is the second most expensive air cooler at my favorite online retailer. For liquid cooling, I placed the rig in my Ikonik Ra X10 Liquid, a nice aluminum full tower that has a complete twin radiator liquid cooling system installed. The cooling system costs just under $200 (difference in cost between case alone and case with cooling system), entire system costs $420.
Temperatures were measured with Lavalys Everest Ultimate and Gigabyte’s ET6. (they both always gave the same CPU temp, I just wanted to make sure) Idle temperatures were taken after the system sat idle for 30 minutes. CPU 100% load was attained by running “Torture Test” from the latest version of Prime95, which not only loads all four of the i7’s cores, but also fully loads the four virtual cores. I used the “Large FFTs” which causes the i7 to generate the most heat. Ambient room temperature for all testing was 70F.
The H50 actually outperformed both coolers at stock clock. But, the cooling tale is told when the processor is overclocked.
I overclocked the i7 920 to 3.88gHz. This isn’t my highest overclock with that CPU, but it is a very healthy (and stable) overclock that requires the Vcore and QPI voltage to be raised considerably, which causes the CPU to generate a lot of heat. The last two air coolers I tried at that clock didn’t make the trip, and caused the CPU to reach its shutdown temperature.
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