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About a month back I finally decided that I was going to figure out why my computer wasn’t behaving nearly as well as it’s expected to.

For example I had been playing Mass Effect, the original on my PC, it’s a couple years old at this point and my machine, which is a Intel Core 2 Duo 3.0GHz processer, 4GB of ram, and 1GB EVGA nVidia GTS 250… well beyond the specs recommended. but still I was struggling with framerate of 20 or less most of the time. I had seriously been considering buying a new box outright. Dropping 3k on some custom built machine to satisfy my PC gaming “epeen”. The more I looked at the harder it became to justify it, I’ve only had ~this~ box for a year or so, maybe 2 at this point. I had only thrown it together because I literally broke my last one installing a new video card (literally, snapped a capacitor right off the board… not my finest moment). Ideally I’d wait another year before getting a new system when things are little more financially stable around here.

So I installed some monitoring software and noticed my idle temperature was about 65°F, and while I was gaming it would top out at 100°F, clearly this is too hot, but what I didn’t know is that modern CPUs will throttle themselves to prevent damage… a great feature, I just wish there was some other form of indicator that said “you might want to think about your cooling situation”. So once I learned these things I went ahead and ordered a replacement for my stock heat sink.

Introducing the Corsair H50 Liquid Cooling System… this is by no means new tech, but I’ve always been intrigued by liquid cooling, but have always been freaked out by the idea of liquids being so close to the electronics. The beauty of this system is that it’s completely self-contained and assembled when it arrives. It was on sale so I picked it up!

H50 boxed... w/friends..

The unfortunate part about this particular setup is that it requires a mounting bracket be installed on the bottom of the motherboard, which meant that I had to completely disassemble my box to get it in there. Oddly enough, this went fairly smoothly for me… on the other hand, taking things apart is usually easy… it’s the getting it back together that’s the issue.

the bottom of my motherboard... CTS & Ezio ready to get into action

Because the h50 supports a plethora of chipsets it comes with a couple different brackets, a couple different frontside mounts, and a couple different widgets to make the right pieces work together. Kudos to them on a design that is so diverse, but it meant a fair amount of fiddling around on my part. The instructions were very clear, and had I been very careful this would have gone smoothly, sadly I managed to switch my socket 775 quick start guide with the 1336 one, and so my widgets were attached backwards, and my screws were out of line so I had to do some back tracking that would have been easily avoidable.

In any case, I got the bracket, and mount setup the only thing left to do was to attach the pump to it and I’d be off to the races.

CTS was a big help, keeping those wires out of my way

CTS kept the wires out of my way while I screwed in the mount. I finished reconnecting all the wires that were disconnected to get the motherboard out. I thought for sure I was going to screw this up, I never open my PC and have everything working perfectly the first time. This was the exception, I plugged the box in, it fired right up. I got back into windows and fired up the ASUS ProbeII software that came with the motherboard, and noted the CPU temperatures at idle down to a whopping 23°F … I did the only logical next step, fired up some of the games that were giving me grief. Temps were topping out at 49°F, my frame rates were consistent and every game I retried ran flawlessly. I feel like I’ve got a renewed system at this point, and I’m ecstatic about it. It should easily keep me going until my next scheduled upgrade (hopefully around this time next year).

I’m pretty happy with the cooling system overall, it wasn’t too bad to install so long as you setup properly before hand (took me about an hour and a half). It seems to have resolved my issue, so the 70$ investment quite literally saved me the cost of buying a whole new box. I’m not one of those guys who gets a kick out of performing benchmarks and comparing before and afters and whatnot to provide a truly educated conclusion, but I can tell you that (even in my limited experience with it at this point) my system has greatly benefited from this product, and so long as it doesn’t explode here in the next couple days, I’d recommend it to anyone looking for cooling in this price range.