Is the system noisy?

Unfortunately, it is. It’s normal that the system is audible at the maximum speed of its 120mm fan (~1800rpm). In the quiet mode (~1300rpm), there is less noise, but a very unpleasant whistle appears. Increasing or decreasing the fan speed might have helped to get rid of it, but smooth speed adjustment is not implemented. As a result, I had to test the Corsair Nautilus500 at the maximum fan speed.

Is this cooling system efficient?

It depends on what you compare it with. At a clock-gen frequency of 325MHz and a core voltage of 1.55V the temperature of an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ processor (Socket AM2) overclocked to 2925MHz and running the S&M utility was only 62°C with the Nautilus500 and 68°C with the Scythe Mine cooler. So, the Corsair Nautilus500 is surely more effective than the Scythe Mine and is far better than the box coolers AMD and Intel supply with their processors. On the other hand, the Corsair Nautilus500 was beaten by the Tuniq Tower 120 cooler by 3°C (57.6°C and 54.8°C, respectively) when they were cooling a dual-core Intel Pentium D 930 overclocked to 3.98GHz without any voltage increase.

Power consumption and heat dissipation of Intel Pentium D processors is very high, especially if you overclock them, so I was wary of checking the coolers with a voltage increase, expecting errors right after the launch of the S&M test. The Corsair Nautilus500 managed to surprise me, however, as it coped with the Intel Pentium D overclocked to 4.25GHz (290MHz FSB) with the core voltage increased to 1.45V. The CPU temperature rose to 68.1°C as opposed to 65.9° with the Tuniq Tower 120. So, this liquid cooling system obviously has a highly efficient water-block that is capable of quickly taking heat away from the CPU and giving it over to the coolant. The higher temperature with the water cooler may be due to the small size of its heatsink and the low performance of the pump.

On the other hand, temperature is relative rather than an absolute parameter. Different mainboards will report different temperatures under the same conditions, which are also hard to keep the same, considering the great diversity between the tested cooling systems. A long-time test is needed, but the longer you test coolers, the higher the ambient (room) temperature grows. So, I compared the systems by the maximum achievable overclocking: the Tuniq Tower 120 kept an Intel Pentium D 930 stable at 4.43GHz clock rate (295MHz FSB) and a core voltage of 1.5V. The CPU thermal throttling was triggered when I tried the Corsair Nautilus500 under the same conditions.

What’s the advantages of the Corsair Nautilus500?

The main advantage of liquid cooling systems over traditional air coolers is that they can take heat out of the system case. This is especially noticeable when a hot processor like Intel’s dual-core Pentium D is being cooled. When overclocked and put under load, it can warm up a whole room, let alone the small volume of a computer case.

Besides that, the Corsair Nautilus500 has a few specific features:

• The system is compact and ships already assembled
• It can be disassembled if necessary and the valves prevent the liquid from flowing out
• Efficient water-block with micro-channel architecture
• It can be installed quickly and easily on all modern processor types (LGA775, Socket 478, 754, 939, 940 and AM2)
• With additional water-blocks the system can be used to cool the graphics card and/or the mainboard’s chipset