Corsair Nautilus 500

Here, the price of simplicity means getting less than you were expecting.

One of the rules of surviving in business is to diversify, and once again Corsair is straying away from its core business of RAM to bring us the Nautilus 500 – watercooling for your CPU.

The Nautilus is an external box, intended to sit on top of your case. Installation has to be the one of the easiest we’ve clapped our mitts on, with hoses pre-attached to the water block and attachment to the reservoir a simple clip and clasp affair. Filling the reservoir also rates among one of the most mess-free experiences we’ve had.

Because the Nautilus is an external unit, a passthrough PCI bracket is included through which the water tubes travel. A molex connector and two fan headers need to be hooked up to the PSU/motherboard for unit power and to measure fan and pump speed respectively.

The pump is unfortunately a little noisy – while switching the fan down to the lower setting helps reduce some of the overall ruckus, it still hums along a bit like a fish tank filter. Ultimately you could get used to it, but there are quieter solutions on the market.

After the required flooding of the tank with additive and water, and making sure all air bubbles were removed from the system it was strapped onto Chernobyl at the standard 80W. The result was slightly underwhelming, especially considering the air cooled Zalman we reviewed this month: 42°C at high fan speed, and up to 44°C at low in an ambient temperature of 23°C.

With the noise generated, the cost and the results recorded, we can see no reason why you would purchase this over a decent
air cooled heatsink.