Corsair Breaks Into Custom Water Cooling With Hydro X

There’s been rumors for some time that Corsair was going to break into the custom water cooling market, we just didn’t know when. Here we are at Computex 2019, and we finally get to see what Corsair’s been up to.

The Hydro X line is a full selection of all the parts needed to build your own loop; from the blocks that go on the CPU and GPU, the pump and reservoir to push the custom coolant around, different sized radiators to cool everything down, all the fixtures, fittings, and tubing to connect it all together, down to the iCUE control box to control all the fans and RGB lighting.

There are four CPU blocks being launched initially, supporting a range of socket types from Intel and AMD, including LGA2066, 115X, AM4, and TR4. You also have the standard choice of either black or silver as the main color option. Of course, all of them come with RGB lighting.

The more challenging aspect about custom loops is the GPU, as there can be so much variation between manufacturers, that it’s generally uneconomical to produce full plates. Corsair has picked five GPUs to cater to. On the NVIDIA side, it went with FE cards only, i.e. ‘reference’ designs. These include the 2080 Ti, 2080, 2070, and surprisingly, the 1080 Ti as well. For AMD, there is only a single GPU block at the moment, and that’s for the Vega 64. No word on a Radeon VII design at this time, or indeed Navi, so we’ll have to wait and see for that.

On the radiator side, there’s quite a wide selection to go with, split into two main types. The cheaper XR5 is the more compact series, offering radiators that are 30mm thick, in sizes scaling from 120mm, 140mm, 240mm, 280mm, 360mm, and 420mm – single to three fans, for 120mm to 140mm fans. The XR7 range are the performance radiators at 54mm thick, ranging from 240mm, 360mm, up to a quad-fan mount 480mm radiator.

The pump/reservoir is a fairly standard piece of kit, holding 330ml of fluid, with an 800L/h pump, drawing up to 30 Watts of power. Corsair lists the pump as a Xylem D5. Should mention that all fixtures and fittings across the range have been sized to 1/4 inch, so there will be broad compatibility.

With tubing, there is both softline and hardline available, either as PVC for the soft tubing, and PMMA for the hard tubes, as well as short hardline pipes for connecting two GPUs together. With fittings, there’s large array of shapes, styles and sizes. There are 45 and 90 degree bends, adapters for the larger 14mm hardline tubes, compression fittings, ball valves, Y-splitters, blanking plates, and all can be had in either white, black, chrome or gold.

If you are not sure what kit you need, Corsair has thrown together an interactive custom configurator on its website, where you can pick your existing gear, and let site guide you to the parts you need, including any additional fans you may need, plus spare fittings. Needless to say, if you really want to deck out your system, things can get real pricey. However, having another competitor in the market will hopefully liven things up a bit.