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The Hydrocool sitting snugly next to a PC
The pipes are easy to connect and very secure
The bright green liquid that pumps around the HydroCool

Watercooling is usually the reserve of supercomputers and enthusiasts, but it has now been given a facelift thanks to popular memory vendor, Corsair. Many PC users have been put off watercooling, thinking that it was too complicated and posed a large risk to their valuable hardware. But now Corsair has developed the HydroCool 200 that has most of the key components built into a single unit, making it less complicated to install and use.

The image of watercooling being something cooked up by an over enthusiastic teenager in his parents’ garage should be banished from your mind. Today’s systems use high quality components to build intricate and safe cooling systems. Legendary supercomputer manufacturer Cray was using liquid cooling over a decade ago on multi-million pound machines, so it should be safe to use on a modern PC.

The technology behind watercooling is not that difficult to understand and works much like the system present in a car engine. There are five main components in any watercooling system, pump, reservoir, water block, radiator and the pipes. Although some systems do not use reservoirs, the Corsair HydroCool employs the full shebang.

On the front of the unit is a three digit display showing the water temperature in either degrees Celsius or Fahrenheit. Alarms can be set to warn you when the water temperature passes a certain threshold. One further button marked Turbo' allows superior cooling at the expense of noise.

The real advantage of watercooling is not sub-zero temperatures but the ability to keep a safe, stable temperature during heavy processor loads. With processors becoming increasingly faster, they generate more heat resulting in the need for faster and louder fan based cooling systems. The HydroCool 200 does have one fan, but through two preset speeds you are able to control the noise emitted by the unit.

The water block is the interface between the water that passes through it and the CPU that lies beneath it. Water needs more energy to increase its temperature than metals. Typically a kilogram of a metal requires around 300-700 Joules of energy to increase its temperature by 1 C (or 1 K), however water requires 4200 Joules for a similar increase. Couple that to the fact that the water within the Hydrocool is constantly moving with a radiator thrown in too cool the water down, and you have a cooling solution far superior to a standard heatsink and fan.

With the reservoir, pump and radiator all placed in the main body of the Hydrocool, installation is much easier than custom-built watercooling solutions. Corsair supplies all fixtures and fittings including tubing, self-sealing nozzles, plastic and metal clamps, control daughterboard and retention clips for both AMD Athlon XP and Intel Pentium 4 processors.

Installation of any such cooling system requires some preparation and with the HydroCool it's no different. Reading the manual, which is supplied in thorough and quick-install versions is essential even though Corsair has done a good job of simplifying most overly technical bits. You are after all putting water next to electronics, which can be potentially life threatening.

Initially you leave the wet stuff well away from the computer and mount the control daughterboard in a free PCI slot. The daughterboard relays power and temperature readings back to the central unit. A four-pin power connection needs to be made inside the computer along with two small headers, one that relays the temperature of the water block and a second that connects the power switch to both the motherboard and the daughterboard. Effectively pressing the power button on your computer will result in both the computer and HydroCool starting.

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