CPU AIR
COOLER
CORSAI R A500
It may may seem strange that Corsair hasn't had extensive
repertoire of air cooler to match its liquid cooler range, but the company
did actually try a while ago, with mixed
results. It’s a monstrous £80 dual-fan cooler, which
aims to offer premium air cooling and a hefty amount of over clocking head room.
This massive cooler’s measurements stretch to 169mm long and 171mm tall, with
the latter measurement meaning you’ll need
to pay careful attention to your case’s CPU cooler height limit, as many cases
won’t be able to accommodate it. It also weighs close to 1.5kg, so you won’t want
to drop it on your foot either.
The box is enormous too, but inside there’s no mass of cables
for hooking the A500 up to your PC via USB, nor RGB lighting controllers .In a
rare moment for Corsair, the cooler is devoid of lighting or any fancy software
control. You get a few accessories in the box, though, such as a splitter
cable, which allows you to power both 120mm ML-series fans from a single4-pinheader,as
well as a long-reach screwdriver and tube of thermal paste. You won’t need to
use the latter right away, as the contact
plate comes with a layer of pre-applied thermal
paste, but it’s good to know you won’t need to buy more paste if you upgrade
your CPU.
The rest of the kit includes the cooler’s simple mounting
mechanism. Plates are fixed to the cooler, and they sport sprung thumbscrews,
which attach to threaded pins on additional plates that you secure to your CPU
socket. These thumbscrews sit underneath the enormous central .heat sink, but there’s
has a cut-out section inside the heat sink that allows the included screw driver
to find its way down to secure them. The cooler itself actually looks very attractive too, with a high-quality
removable metal cap on top of it, which hides the heat sink cut-out and heat pipe
tops, but also includes a vent in the top to allow the rear fan to breathe.
The installation process is quick, whether you’re using the
A500 on Intel’s LGA1151 or LGA2066 sockets or an AMD Socket AM4 platform.
Neither Socket TR4 orTRX40 are supported ,but all LGA115x sockets are covered, as
are all AMD sockets back to FM1 and AM3,as well as both of Intel’s LGA2011
sockets.
Corsair claims that the A500 has a 250W thermal design power
(TDP)cooling capacity, which would be enough power to handle any CPU up to
Intel’s18-coremodels.A lot of this cooling power comes down to the fans, which can
reach an ear-splitting speed of 2,400rpm at full speed. Interestingly, though,
Corsair has also opted for both 6mm and 8mm heat pipes with the A500; the
company claims this adds the ability to deal effectively with CPUs with both low
and high TDP. There are four heat pipes in total, and they all make direct
contact with the CPU.
Performance
In our AMD Socket AM4 system, where the A500 was dealing
with a Ryzen 7 1700 overclocked to 3.9GHz using an MSI X470 Gaming Pro Carbon
AC motherboard, both coolers performed the same, with just 1°C between them. Moving
to our overclocked Core i5-9600K system with a manual all-core overclock to
4.8GHz using an Asus ROG Strix Z370-E Gaming, we saw more of a difference.
Here, we saw a 53°C delta T for the liquid cooler and 56°C for the Corsair
A500, admittedly with higher noise levels on the Corsair cooler. Finally, there
was our LGA2066 system, where our 4.2GHz 10-core Core i9-7900X sat at 56°C with
the liquid cooler, and 57°C with the A500. The A500 is certainly louder than
the liquid cooler at full speed, but it’s equally quiet at lower speeds.
Review Source By : ANTONY LEATHER
