Meh. A heatsink is a heatsink, but Corsair took steps to make it look good without ARGB LEDs. If you can remember back to CES 2020, we talked about Corsair getting back into the air cooling game with the A500. Now with the fans going full out at 2,400 RPM the A500 is able to beat the NH-U12A, but it is also beaten by a bunch of coolers that operate at lower maximum speeds. Bring your CPU temperatures down with the Corsair A500 high Performance Dual fan CPU cooler, taking advantage of four direct-contact copper heat pipes to cool CPUs up to 250W TDP. Tweet Core i9 9900K Baseline test. We are going to be comparing all of those heatsinks in this review, so Corsair definitely needs to bring their A game to the table. A Closer Look. This cooler is certainly well equipped, and it comes with two of their premium ML120 fans. As a result, testing is done in a closed Fractal Design Meshify C2 that’s equipped with two intake fans and one exhaust fan, each operating at a constant 600 RPM. My highest temps when stressed tested the CPU was at 76°C. Corsair's A500 dual-fan CPU cooler is a monster in terms of size, with an appealing design and features that set it apart. Corsair A500 Dual Fan CPU Air Cooler Review 04 Feb, 2020 Rakesh Sharma Reviews . Our review unit of the Corsair A500 came in a medium-sized brown corrugated cardboard box from Ryder Integrated Logistics in Ontario, California, USA. We are going to start things off with the stock CPU speeds and the default fan profile from our ASUS X299 motherboard, which by the way dynamically increases fan speeds as temperature rises. Read on to find out! James Dawson January 22, 2020 Cooling, Featured Tech Reviews, Reviews Performance and Comparisons . By comparison, the other heatsinks actually see their temperatures reduced in this test. Abrimos el embalaje, nos encontramos en un primer nivel la caja de accesorios, mientras que el disipador queda protegido por un grueso marco de plástico para que llegue impol… A metal cover with Corsair's logo in the middle of the mesh makes it look refined and classy. Noctua doesn’t have that issue since the U12A is slightly offset towards the motherboard I/O area, so it supports taller memory kits without modifying the fan position. If that’s not enough, you get a massive heatsink with four direct-contact copper heat pipes, pre-applied XTM50 paste and more included in the box. Written by Matthew Lambert March 20, 2020 | 14:33. The heat pushed out by this overclocked Core i9-10980XE is just insane, and the A500 couldn’t handle it. It beats the NH-U12A and Dark Rock Pro 4 by a narrow margin, but it trails the less expensive NH-U14S. Tom's Hardware is part of Future US Inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. If you really like the looks of this cooler, and if you don’t have a lot of space in your case for one of the bigger coolers like the Noctua NH-D15, then maybe just maybe the A500 could be for you, but it wouldn’t be my first choice. The A500 is compatible with: AMD: AM4, AM3, FM2, and FM1; Intel: 115x, 2066, 2011-3, and 2011 . Corsair A500 Review: Premium Price, Curious Flaws Corsair conjures up a new cooler without liquid, a pump, or even RGB. We clean every cooler base of pre-installed thermal compound using alcohol wipes and cloth and later use Arctic MX-4 for all of our tests. by Parm Mann on 17 January 2020, 14:01 ... No small task, yet in many aspects the A500 is a welcome alternative. We recommend reapplying thermal paste ever 12 to 18 months. 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’s 18-core models. Promising high performance and coming with a hefty price tag to match, the A500 seems to have its sights on some of the very best and most respected coolers on … The ambient room temperature is maintained at 22°C, and testing only begins once the interior case temperatures have stabilized at 25°C. Time for the essence of this review. Elevata qualità costruttiva e prestazioni in linea con le attese, ma una rumorosità che non tutti riusciranno a sopportare. Get instant access to breaking news, in-depth reviews and helpful tips. NY 10036. Ships from United States. In fact, about a decade ago they launched the A50 and A70 heatsinks targeted towards the entry-level market, and they offered a pretty good price-to-performance ratio at the time. Is this easiest, most efficient, and effective way to cool your overclocked CPU? How to Upgrade and Optimize Your Gaming Laptop for 2021. For example, the Noctua DH-15 Chromax, the be quiet! Price: $99.99 Buy Now » Discuss this article (1) More A New Air Cooler from Corsair! Tags: #air-cooler #cooler #cpu-cooler #ml120. I think this is by far one of the best ways to mount a fan instead of relying on clips, it’s just an awesome feature. By Garrett Carver 16 May 2020 See more "corsair a500 " In stock. Corsair A500 CPU Cooler Review. Share. By Garrett Carver 16 May 2020 Corsair A500 Dual Fan CPU Cooler: Conclusion. Tags: #air-cooler #cooler #cpu-cooler #ml120. How often should I replace the thermal paste? Prev. The central cutaway is also visible here, showing how the tension screws are accessed via this channel. However, we will go over the Intel installation method in detail … Unless you love its looks, there are better options available for less than this cooler’s $100 asking price. It’s pure genius and it’s come in clutch for us when we were installing coolers inside a case. GeIL Announces Availability of EVO SPEAR Phantom Gaming Edition Memory » Corsair A500 Review (Page 4 of 4) Page 4 - Conclusion. CORSAIR A500 Dual Fan CPU Air Cooler Review CORSAIR has a brand new CPU cooler on the market, and while this is a common occurrence from the prolific It’s pretty obvious that the A500 is designed to compete against similarly priced alternatives, but only on lower TDP processors. A500 is simply louder, hotter, and every bit as costly as the other coolers on the market rated for 250W. Rating: 8.5. The CORSAIR A500 boasts quad direct-contact copper heat pipes to draw heat away from your CPU, dual magnetic levitation bearing fans for provide superb customizable airflow and pre-applied CORSAIR XTM50 thermal material for optimal heat transfer. Let’s check it out. The A500 is certainly louder than the liquid cooler at full speed, but it’s equally quiet at lower speeds. Now this is a pretty interesting product from Corsair, because they are typically used to pimping their AIO solutions. admin June 21, 2020 15 0. The performance of the Corsair A500 is as great as its size! From PC cases to RGB liquid cooling to lot of memory products and I have great experience personally used them for many years. Corsair A500 CPU Cooler Review. On the X299 platform things can get pretty tight too, but only between the A500 and GPUs with backplates, or if you have the memory slots fully populated with 8 memory sticks. Instead of using cheap metal clips for two fans, Corsair is actually using these plastic brackets that can just slide on and off without messing around too much. Written by Matthew Lambert ... but CES 2020 brought the surprise reveal of the Corsair A500, a new dual-fan tower cooler. It may seem strange that Corsair hasn’t had extensive repertoire of air coolers to match its liquid cooler range, but the company did actually try a while ago, with mixed results. There are all the usual fittings too, including AM4, AM3, GM2, LGA115x, and LGA20xx. Corsair's A500 dual-fan CPU cooler is a monster in terms of size, with an appealing design and features that set it apart. Product on Review: CORSAIR A500 Manufacturer: CORSAIR Street Price: GBP £84.99 / USD $99.99 It’s been a long time since CORSAIR produced an air cooler, almost a decade in fact. At stock CPU settings there is a massive temperature drop when running the new fans at 1000 RPM. The A500 … After a ten year break, Corsair are back with the A500 Dual Fan CPU Air Cooler. One of the heatpipes (second from the left) is slightly raised when compared with the others in our sample, which is easily seen with a steel straightedge and some backlighting. Although the NH-U12A is priced the same as the A500, it is a more compact cooler with considerably better memory, motherboard and expansion slot compatibility. Intuitive Slide-and-lock Fan Mount System Corsair A500 Review. There’s a void in the middle for easier access to the mounting hardware, but that area can also cause issues with constant linear airflow through all the fins. As we come to the end of this review I am pulled in two different directions when it comes to the Corsair A500. Corsair A500 CPU Cooler Review. Tweet. The review also goes into detail about why we had to file down the heat pipes on the A500. Corsair marketed the A500 as a high-end CPU air cooler, with thermal dissipation performance to rival some of the current market leaders. The Corsair A500 promises advanced cooling performance with four direct-contact copper heat pipes and two ML120 fans in a mega-sized package. The Corsair A500 offers up a polarizing grey-scale aesthetic and good (though, not great) thermal performance, with high-performance fans in an adjustable sliding frame. Regrettably, that’s just not good enough to be competitive in this market filled with the Noctua NH-U12A and NH-D15 and the be quiet! This whole setup is put under very strict temperature conditions. Fans are pre-installed out of the box in a standard push+pull configuration, eliminating any confusion around fan and airflow direction. … By red454 - February 11, 2020. Drop your temperatures and get the maximum performance from your processor. That is quite a bit of a distance from the company's actual headquarters in Fremont, but regardless of which, using UPS Standard, everything arrived in mostly acceptable condition to us here in Calgary, Alberta, Canada for our review today. In fact, you can even buy a Noctua NH-U14S along with an extra fan for about the same price as the A500. The CORSAIR A500 and iCUE RGB PRO XT Series coolers are available immediately from the CORSAIR webstore and the CORSAIR worldwide network of authorized retailers and distributors. We found installation to be remarkably easy as well, but performance could be better. The A12 fans have a lower static pressure rating, but they can move a lot more air at lower RPMs too. Switching to acoustics, and we see a hard fail for the A500. Unless you … The reason is that both of those factors can skew results and cover up poor performance. While the numbers really do speak for themselves I guess it’s time to wrap up this review. On idle it runs ar 33°C and the fans doesn't even bother spinning. The cooler is undoubtedly premium, with packaging, parts and looks to match. © 2020 Hardware Canucks. Most of the high-end heatsinks from Cooler Master, Deepcool, be quiet!, and Noctua have more traditional bases and they look really good compared to Corsair’s one. Two Corsair Ml120 PWM magnetic levitation bearing fans run between 400 RPM for ultra-quiet operation or 2, 400 RPM for extreme cooling performance. Our idea was to install the Noctua A12 fans from the NH-U12A onto Corsair brackets. The center of the tower fin stack has a central cutaway to allow the Phillips screwdriver direct access through this channel to the tension screws of the base. Performance Analysis . Corsair A500 review. We have seen three A500’s now and every one has a minor base variance like this one, so it isn’t unique to just one sample. I’ve also got to commend Corsair for including a pretty legit screwdriver. This result is very good, considering it is benchmarked against the best air cooler in the market today. The four direct-contact heatpipes of the cooler are integrated into the plated mounting base. The Corsair A500 dual fan CPU cooler is a massive solution for those that want the best thermal performance, but don't want to go with liquid cooling. Well that CPU cooler has finally arrived and as you can see below it’s one big cooler. The review also goes into detail about why we had to file down the heat pipes on the A500. The A500 does an excellent job of keeping our 9700K cool, keeping up with the best coolers on the market, including the Noctua NH-U12A and even beating all of the currently tested CORSAIR AIOs. The Corsair A500 comes with a 5-year warranty and retails for $99.99 USD (MSRP). The heat source for our tests is Intel’s Core i9-10980XE at stock settings and also overclocked to 4.5Ghz on all cores. This automatically puts the Corsair A500 in the league of the best. To Corsair’s credit the A500 actually becomes the quietest option, but you need to sacrifice temperatures to get there. The Corsair A500 promises advanced cooling performance with four direct-contact copper heat pipes and two ML120 fans in a mega-sized package. The CORSAIR A500 boasts quad direct-contact copper heat pipes to draw heat away from your CPU, dual magnetic levitation bearing fans for provide superb customizable airflow and pre-applied CORSAIR XTM50 thermal material for optimal heat transfer. It’s just plain BIG. At full speed this thing is loud, like really loud, to a point where it almost matches the Kraken X62. The inclusion of RGB fans are a welcome addition to will appeal to a huge range of customers, and their performance is good enough for most average users. Bring your CPU temperatures down with the CORSAIR A500 High Performance Dual Fan CPU Cooler, equipped with four direct-contact copper heat pipes and two CORSAIR ML120 fans. On the other hand, the NH-U14S and NH-U12A were also running at 100% fan speed, but they actually pass this test. Save Saved Removed 0. Obviously, the Core i9-10980XE is one of the hottest running chips around, especially when it’s overclocked, but according to Corsair the A500 is rated for 250W which is the same rating as the other coolers in this comparison. It’s bigger than my hand, it’s bigger than my face, and I’m not a small guy. However, they spanked the A500 pretty hard. What some of you might not remember is that the A500 is not Corsair’s first air cooler. In this scenario the A500 puts in a very respectable result. When Corsair announced a new range of CPU coolers at CES earlier this month, we fully expected a few more additions to its thriving portfolio of all-in-ones, but the new air-cooled A500? Over the years I've heard of many people who are afraid of liquid cooling. 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 pitch is good and Corsair … Yes! And while the A500 does ship with pre-applied thermal paste, an additional syringe of XTM50 thermal compound is provided for future re-installs of the cooler. The official presentation took place on the 6th of January. There was a problem. Larger memory DIMMs can be accounted for with a bit of vertical adjustment of the fans, although this may only be required with the tallest of memory sticks. Corsair A500 Review. Dark Rock Pro 4. Corsair ships the A500 with a quality set of mounting hardware, including nicely plated mounting studs and securing nuts as well as a very robust, laser-cut steel backplate. Thankfully that’s super easy since it just slides upwards, but it also means a bunch of the fans airflow won’t be getting to where it’s needed. When you take out the fans and remove the top bracket you’re basically greeted with a pretty basic cooler with four heat pipes that run up into smaller individual fin arrays. 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