Corsair Nautilus 500 Watercooling Kit

Conclusions

Do we like it?

Actually, we love it. We have to be perfectly frank: every watercooling kit that is bespoke and claims to be easy to build has usually left us somewhat cold, albeit not always in the literal sense. The Nautilus 500 seems to have hit every nail on the head - allow me to explain:

Performance: Outstanding. We tried to throw something very hot at the Nautilus and it gave us the impression that we were not even pushing it hard. It outperforms a kit made out of some of the best and well known parts on the market, and is upgradeable to even cool a couple of red hot GPUs in SLI as well as the northbridge chipset. All this without breaking the sound annoyance barrier. In fact Corsair claim that the Nautilus 500 can dissipate up to 500W of heat! We haven't tested this - we don't have the SLI waterblocks yet - but we are pretty certain Corsair wouldn't claim something the kit isn't capable of.

Looks: Stylish. The system is well built and well finished and exudes quality. When compared to the previous Corsair incarnation it is miles ahead. For a product to step over from the enthusiasts to the mainstream market, it needs to have visual appeal, that's exactly what the Nautilus 500 has.

Value: With a RRP from Corsair of just under £100 the Nautilus 500 is in the same league with the Alpahacool system we tested albeit much easier to build. That's really the issue here: there may be other kits out there from the likes of Asetek, Alphacool and the other big boys of watercooling at around the same price point but they are nowhere near as simple to assemble as the Nautilus 500, so a fair comparison is not easy. If the Nautilus performed poorly, we could continue with the stance that all-in-one kits will never perform as well as the custom build starter kits, but it doesn't - the Nautilus 500 is a great performer.




To summarise:

Pros:
Build Quality
Ease of assembly
Quietness
Looks

Cons:
Tubing damaged easily by backplate

Final thoughts

With the watercooling market filling slowly with kits that take the worry out of selecting your required components, it was only a matter of time until somebody upped the ante by making watercooling simple to install. Corsair have taken it even further, by improving immensely on the external idea they had thought of nearly three years ago.

The Nautilus 500 is simply incredible value for what you are getting: a bespoke yet flexible, well performing external watercooling system capable of dissipating an whopping 500W of heat. With watercooling as simple as this, liquid cooling could well be helped along its evolutionary path with a firm kick from behind dealt by Corsair.