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The Verdict
What Corsair did with this product is quite interesting. They wanted a mainstream water-cooling solution that is easy to install and has better than average performance. Well they certainly succeeded. The build quality here and there is a little vague though. All essential components however in the water-circuit are top notch. The radiator being glued down and that little LED being mounted with double sided sticky tape .. hey it's not the most exquisite solution. None the less it did bring the overall costs down and that resulted into today's product.
The Nautilus 500 most definitely is not a high-performance water-cooling solution but it's way beyond average though. It'll cool down your CPU more than sufficiently and granted you might be able to pull off some nice overclocking as it'll draw away a lot of heat. Generally speaking, water cooling a PC offers quite a few rewards over air cooling, including lower noise levels and higher cooling performance. Also heat coming from your processor is no longer dumped inside the PC, thus other components benefit from this also. It's pricing level however always has been the achilles heel. Corsair's Nautilus 500 is a complete water cooling kit, compatible with both Intel and AMD platforms which means you can upgrade at a later stage. It's affordable and also easy to install.
For sure, you can pick this kit up for $150 (USD), there's no way you can go wrong here, it is a a great self-contained system.
Thanks go out to Corsair for providing this sample, especially Vivian who by now I should congratulate for personal reasons ;)
