Corsair Hydro Series H5 SF AIO CPU Cooler Review

Performance

With the H5 SF having a very compact radiator design and a blower fan, I wasn’t expecting it to have groundbreaking performance, and well, it didn’t. It still kept our CPU cool, though, and would be more than suitable for running at these temperatures all day long.

When pushed, the performance was actually better than I expected. clocking in around the same as the Alphenfohn ATLAS and the Arctic Liquid Freeze 120mm; a high-performance air cooler and a standard 120mm radiator AIO; that’s not bad at all.

The blower fan was never going to be that quiet and ran around 44/46dBa on our test bench. Now, it’s worth picking out something here, as while it was a little noisier than most, it’s a completely different sound due to the fan design. It sounds more like a GPU at moderate load and is far less annoying, to my ears at least, than an equally loud 120mm fan.

Things improved a little here, about on par with the TD02-Lite and TD03, which is pretty darn impressive overall. I did notice, however, that it fluctuates under load quite quickly, jumping from around 45 to 47 dBa for a few seconds. It doesn’t do it a lot, but when we dialed back CPU clocks and voltages a little bit in an extra test run, this problem seemed to go away.