I've been asked on a number of times to do CPU heat sink installation tutorials
so I'm going to start with one on the Corsair A50 so this is their mainstream
CPU Cooler you can see it is a three uh thick 8 mm heat pipe uh direct touch
Tower heat sink so that's actually fairly
straightforward so we'll start with the CPU in the socket that is a core i7 875k
unlocked so the first two things we're going to need are some uh TP in this
case Charmin very very soft very nice
and we will also need some rubbing alcohol
so go ahead and open that up rubbing alcohol is going to allow you to remove
the old thermal compound and not leave behind any nasty residue so go ahead get
some rubbing alcohol on there and then wipe off the old thermal
compound honestly it doesn't have to be perfect as long as you do a reasonably
good job uh what I usually do is I'll I'll wipe off as much as I can with the
wet part of the uh of the toilet paper
or paper towel or whatever I happen to be using and then um I'll go back and
grab a fresh
piece and then just uh wipe off any sort
of random residue that might be left so that gets our CPU nice and
clean and ready for the next stage so
you can see it's all ah you can't see that never mind okay so the next stage
is to put on whatever brackets are
required in order to mount the CPU so I've never mounted this cooler before so
this is going to be a bit of a journey of Discovery for me uh trying to mount a
CPU Cooler that I've never done before um couldn't be that complicated I mean
Corsair usually does a pretty bang up job of this kind of stuff so I found
four screws and I found a back plate so
let's assume the back plate goes on first and that it is not adjusted to the
correct settings so I'm moving it one notch in to LGA
1156 cuz this is a universal back plate it's compatible with 775 1156 and
1366 so we're going to go over here if we have a case with a um uh with a a CPU
back plate hole then this is where that really comes in handy because most
aftermarket coolers um anyway the good ones are going to
require a back plat so that they mount nice and uh nice and
strong okay so we got to kind of adjust
these just a little bit with that on there that's kind of interesting so I'm
going to flip over my board uh so they don't line up quite the
way that I had them adjusted that's one thing that can be a little bit finicky
about Universal anything is that it tends to be sort
of not quite without some fine
adjustments so there we go just go ahead and make sure that's on there pretty
good you know what I think one of them is not uh not in the right position
still there we go so just wiggle those a
bit Ah now you can see it's it doesn't
have to stay in place as long as the holes are coming up and it's not putting
any pressure on the mounting holes of the motherboard so there we've done that
part we have a back plate
success okay oh yeah another important tip for upgrading your heat sink is
never leave an open bottle of rubbing alcohol sitting on the table because at
some point you will knock it off and it
will be bad will not be fun oh you have four
little rubber grommets I wonder if those go on the back of the back
plate I don't have the
instructions I will be back in just a
moment okay well I can't figure it out so let's assume it does nothing uh with
some with some coolers the back plate is a necessary piece because the uh the the
back plate sorry the uh the grommets are a necessary piece because the back plate
doesn't have any non-conductive coating but this one does it has a plastic cover
over the back plate so you don't have to worry about installing it there all
right so here we are now we have this
piece which is going to go through right here and then we will fix it to the heat
sink sink with the four included
screws there we are so this is fairly straightforward basically we're just
taking the hold down plate and attaching it to the CPU
Cooler and that's probably going to go in from the bottom based on how
difficult this is if I try to do it this
way there we are yeah you can see that screw holes
are counter sunk so that yes you can
install these screws from the bottom and
should because that is how it is designed to
work I don't really have a whole lot of commentary I already said everything
that I really thought about this heat sink at the time that I uh unboxed it
that's the thing about guides is if you do them in real time like on the camera
as I tend to do all of my videos then
there's a lot of like long
pauses okay so uh this is the AMD mounting bracket which we will not need
today now why don't we put on some thermal compound so here putting on
thermal compound this is really easy you take your little syringe and then you go
like this you zoom
in there right that's enough that's probably more than enough I probably put
on too much that's okay here I'll let you see how much I put
on if my camera would focus that would be great there we are that is how much I
put on it is probably too much but I mean I could make the argument that I
can put on a little bit extra because there are some grooves in between the uh
the heat pipes and the aluminum base of
the heat sink so maybe we need to fill in more gaps that's my story and I'm
sticking to it so I'm going to be installing a RAM fan so one thing that I
want to be aware of is that I need enough room uh to the side of the cooler
to install my RAM fan so there we are we place the cooler down on top of the back
plate that's very straightforward and then we go ahead and
tighten the thumb screws you always want to put the thumb
screws on before actually uh like
tightening them down with a lot of force see so I've just put them on they're not
actually holding anything right now um that way you
can uh tighten them all at the same time which is going to allow you to apply
even pressure to your CPU throughout the mounting procedure which is uh going to
reduce the chances of damaging it or your
motherboard so you can see that these are thumb screws but they do have uh
Philips head uh holes at the top so what
I'll be doing is I'll be tightening up tightening them up just a little bit so
finger tight right now all four if I want it to be um really anal retentive I
could go in diagonals like this okay
make sure we're tightening that up real good and then I'm going to go ahead and
give them another however much with the screwdriver so yeah these are this is a
good mounting system it's designed to only go as far as it needs to go
so um you can't just here I'll show you what I mean in a sec there it's noted um
so you see how the threading on the screws actually or on the back plate
actually ends and the screws only go on as far as the threading goes so it means
you can't overtighten it which is a really good
feature so now let's go ahead and take the fan that's included with the
A50 and we're going to orient the clips
right here so that they're on the side where they uh clip into the heat sink
and we're going to push it on just
like like something just like that then we're
going to take our CPU fan and we are going to either plug it
straight into the motherboard header which is here there's our CPU
motherboard header or we can plug it into this handy dandy noise reduction
adapter which is basically just a resistor in line and then we can plug
that in that was it that was the whole
installation procedure for the Corsair A50 thank you for for checking it out
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