Corsair Hydro Series H55 Liquid CPU Cooler Review

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.