Corsair Nautilus 500 Watercooling review

Cooling 189 Page 9 of 10 Published by

teaser

Page 9

Testing and benchmarking

Now that the system is hooked up to the active and actually working cooling solution let's run some performance tests. Initial thoughts: very impressive. The CPU running steady at a ~34 C temperature right after windows booted up. You'd almost think 'naah, that's not right'. You simply are not used to temperatures like these with the new high-end systems. As part of the test we maxed the workload of the CPU to 100%, managing some serious encoding work.

  • AMD64 Athlon FX-57
  • 2x 1GB memory
  • Radeon X1900 XT
  • 1 HD
  • 1 Optical DVD burner

The funny part is the temperature does not rise that much with a full 100% workload, it only differed a couple of degrees but basically that's it. This creates some good overclocking potential for the CPU.

Corsair Nautilus 500 review - Copyright 2006 - Guru3D.comCooling method versus temperature in degrees C with LOW setting. The lower the better.

Corsair Nautilus 500 review - Copyright 2006 - Guru3D.com
Cooling method versus temperature in degrees C with HIGH setting. The lower the better.

These are the results with the control unit set at HIGH (12 volts). When we do temperature tests we normally set the room temperature at ~22 Degrees C, however during my test we had a heat wave here in the Netherlands and I was not able to get a better room temperature than 27 Degrees C.

As you can see the CPU in idle is at a good 34-35 Degrees Celsius during that heat wave.

The thing that is most interesting is of course the temperature when we give the CPU a looped burn-in test. It'll work at its hardest thus at 100%, we noticed 41 (LOW) and 40 (HIGH) Degrees C. That's quite a okay. When we relate this to overclocking, your results are going to be limited by the model of CPU or graphics card that you have. Therefore we won't as our overclock results would not tell you the slightest thing.

This is good water-cooling performance. I suggest you leave the unit at the LOW fan setting. It's virtually silent and does not make that much of a difference.

Also there isn't much sound coming from the Nautilus at all, the HIGH setting however is audible and can be a tad unpleasant if the unit is close to you. It's definitely related to the 120mm fan. But with such a minimal performance difference between the two settings I suggest you leave the unit at LOW.

Share this content
Twitter Facebook Reddit WhatsApp Email Print