Corsair A50 Performance CPU Single 120mm Fan Air Cooler Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,863 words · ~9 min read
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today I'll be doing a quick unboxing of the Corsair cooling air series A50 so
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this is a performance CPU Cooler not to be confused with what I have over here
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which is the a70 which is classified as a high
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performance CPU Cooler so this is performance this is high performance
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there are a couple of key differences so what I'll probably end up doing is uh
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taking them both out to do a quick comparison for for you they both feature
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a 2-year warranty as well as compatibility with LGA 775 1156 1366
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core core am3 am2 and
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am3 as well as compatibility with 120 mm
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fans Corsair's 120 mil fans are generally pretty good quality so I'd
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expect this one to be much more of the same you can either select 1600 or 2,000
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RPM on the fan and here we
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have a little performance perance graph compared to your stock cooler I can't
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help but wonder what stock cooler they were using oh here we go core i7 965
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processor running at stock 3.2 GHz so um actually the LGA
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1366 cooler that comes with the 965 is a pretty decent cooler so if it
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outperforms that one by a significant margin you can rest assured it will
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outperform your 1156 775 or AMD stock
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cooler so let's take the packaging off just like this look at that I didn't
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need a knife at all
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I still zoomed in oh yeah that's why you can't see what I'm doing here we go a
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much better so the box is actually similar in
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size to the a70 but a little bit shorter
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okay so you got about H about 2 to 3 cm
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there in terms of extra shortness or
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less length if you prefer they're both the same sideways Dimensions so it's not
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really bigger in that regard go ahead and open up the top here have a look at
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what's inside with the a70 I tried to guess what was inside all the boxes this
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time hopefully I'll be a little bit more accurate okay I'm going to guess that in
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here is
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accessories of some
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sort oh boy sure wish I could get this stuff out of here that would there we go
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all right so Inside the Box we will
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find something to get the box out of the
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light we will find all of the accessories so we have a 120 mm fan
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which comes with their uh shroud SL clip
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that I actually really like it makes fan mounting a breeze and it's also got nice
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anti vibration rubber grommets um mounting the fan to the frame we've also
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got the am2 am3 hold
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down thermal compound thumb screws rubber washers and a fan speed adapter
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fan speed well fan noise reduction adapter so that'll turn your fan speed
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down presumably to, 1600 RPM here's a Corsair Solutions guide outlining all of
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their different solutions including memory Solutions cooling solutions power
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chassis USB and Storage Solutions it's gotten to the point where uh as per
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their dream machine campaign you can actually almost build a PC entirely out
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of Corsair parts so here's their back plate for Intel here's a little plastic
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piece to keep the uh motherboard components on the back from being
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shorted out you can adjust these clips here to go from 775 to 1156 to 1366
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quite easily and then there's a hold down for the top side along with some
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screws perfect so that's all of our mounting accessories as well as our fan
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accessories I'm going to hold on to the fan for now put that in there yeah there we go
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hold onto the fan and let's have a look at the cooler itself so it comes packed
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in foam just like that it comes with a
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little uh quick start guide which which I guess shows you how to install it on
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the socket of your choice that's too much thermal compound I would probably put on about half of that but uh A+ for
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effort of course there I mean they're not wrong the only disadvantage is that
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you're going to get some thermal goop around the edges of your CPU and like
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it's kind of it's kind of hard to clean off of there it won't damage anything
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but it's just a pain when you're trying to clean off the CPU to I don't know put
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it back in a box or or whatever it is you need to do do not return this
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product to the store corser wants to cover all of the technical support
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customer service Etc themselves don't
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eat this and then we have the cooler so it's
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quite a bit smaller than the a70 right off the bat you've got the same black
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top that I really liked on the a70 so you've got three heat pipes coming up
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through it and then instead of seeing a standard silver or chromed top you've
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got a nice black one which will go really well with the black interior and
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of course their 800d the fins are quite tightly spaced but as long as the fan
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has reasonably good static pressure which it better because it's I believe
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the same one that they're using on the H50 then you should get fairly good
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performance out of it that way the fan Clips on that easily that's how hard it
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is so you just clip it on and then you
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can pull it off and clip it on and pull it off but it is secure enough that it's
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not just going to fall off so here if I take the heat sink and shake it around
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like if it was being shipped on a truck
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there it doesn't fall off excellent all right I was hoping it wouldn't fall off
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then we've got the bottom of the heat sink so this is where we see it is a
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heat pipe direct touch heat sink so that oh that was bad that means that it will
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survive a fall from approximately 6 in
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above the table and it will not be damaged because it is engineered like
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that okay so I'm just distracting you right now while I pull the a70 out of
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its box so that I can do a quick comparison against its little brother
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the A50 here we
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are all right it looks a lot bigger but it's not actually that much bigger it's
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just because of the additional bulk from the fans I mean it's a little bit bigger
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but anyway let's finish off with the A50 here so I'll do the obligatory finger
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shot it's not all that shiny but it does look quite flat although my uh my
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unmeasured appearance om meter is not
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going to give us too good an indication of that but I would expect it to be
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reasonably well manufactured I mean that is one of the things that is tough about
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heat pipe direct touch though is that when you're manufacturing you do have to
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make sure that it is aligned completely precisely all of the heat pipes and that
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they are aligned precisely with the base because what you do is you assemble the
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whole thing mush it all together and then you have to actually flatten the
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whole thing as a whole so if you go too far you'll go inside the heat pipes heat
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pipes are not solid they are Hollow and usually full of some kind of a a gas SL
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liquid cuz that's what allows it to transfer heat so quickly so if you go
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too far you puncture a heat pipe rendering the whole thing useless and if
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you don't go far enough then you're going to lose some of the efficiency of
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actually having the heat sink directly on top of the heat spreader of the
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CPU oh look oh there's cor our logos on
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uh on on the bottom too there's a nice Finishing Touch for you you'll never see
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it in all likelihood but it's there you'll it's there and that'll make you
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feel better okay so here we are we can compare the two heat sinks against each
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other so the first thing you'll notice in terms of difference is that the a70
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looks much bigger because of the big fan I already mentioned that the next thing
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you'll notice is that it has more heat pipes so it has 33% more heat pipes and
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in theory 33% more performance although it probably doesn't quite work out that
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way let's just um strip the fans off them so you can see just how much
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thicker it is I can also tell already that it has quite a bit more surface
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area in terms of fins too because what they've done with the uh with the A50 is
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they've actually gone a little bit okay yeah you can see it has a slightly
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different shape to it
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so no you can't really see that okay I guess the only difference here is that
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the A50 only has the one side that you can clip the fan to that's kind of
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interesting so rather than being shaped the same on both sides like the a70
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because the a70 is designed to have a fan clip to either side you can see clip
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Marks here here here and here the A50
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can only accept a fan on the one side this side is actually flat that's why it
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looked like there was actually less thin material on this side of the heat pipes
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to me but it's not actually the case although it is quite a bit thinner so
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you know what I'm it's hard to say how much performance difference you'd see
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but um maybe I'll have to actually test these and find out just how well they do
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maybe I'll test them against the uh Co gauge Arrow here which is this enormous
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monstrosity thing it's um
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yeah okay well enough speculation they both use nice fat 8mm heat pipes so
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that's a really good thing to see so even though this one only is a three
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heat pipe cooler it's going to do quite a bit better than a uh heat pipe cooler
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that uses only 6 mm heat pipes thank you for checking out my unboxing of the
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Corsair A50 CPU heat sink and I hope you
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enjoyed it don't forget to subscribe both to Linus Tech tips as well as NCC
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my other official NC Channel and thank you for watching