As a part of vehicle thermal management, water-cooled intercoolers play an important role in engine efficiency. The incompressible simulation model was usually applied to estimate the performance of water-cooled intercoolers. In this paper, the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) compressible model is taken to analyze more accurate prediction models. The rate of section change, heat exchange, and the surface friction coefficient are used as the comparison basis of the compressible flow model and incompressible model on the pressurized air side of the water-cooled intercooler. By comparing the simulation results of the air side, it was found that the compressible simulation is closer to the experimental value than the incompressible simulation. Compared with the experiment, the compressible model heat transfer maximum value of deviation is 6.5%, and the pressure loss maximum deviation is 7.5%. This provides guidance to optimize the design of heat exchangers, in order to save on costs and shorten development times.