Corsair A50 Heatpipe Heatsink Cooler Installation Guide Tutorial Video Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,591 words · ~7 min read
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I've been asked on a number of times to do CPU heat sink installation tutorials
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so I'm going to start with one on the Corsair A50 so this is their mainstream
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CPU Cooler you can see it is a three uh thick 8 mm heat pipe uh direct touch
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Tower heat sink so that's actually fairly
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straightforward so we'll start with the CPU in the socket that is a core i7 875k
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unlocked so the first two things we're going to need are some uh TP in this
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case Charmin very very soft very nice
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and we will also need some rubbing alcohol
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so go ahead and open that up rubbing alcohol is going to allow you to remove
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the old thermal compound and not leave behind any nasty residue so go ahead get
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some rubbing alcohol on there and then wipe off the old thermal
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compound honestly it doesn't have to be perfect as long as you do a reasonably
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good job uh what I usually do is I'll I'll wipe off as much as I can with the
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wet part of the uh of the toilet paper
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or paper towel or whatever I happen to be using and then um I'll go back and
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grab a fresh
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piece and then just uh wipe off any sort
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of random residue that might be left so that gets our CPU nice and
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clean and ready for the next stage so
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you can see it's all ah you can't see that never mind okay so the next stage
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is to put on whatever brackets are
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required in order to mount the CPU so I've never mounted this cooler before so
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this is going to be a bit of a journey of Discovery for me uh trying to mount a
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CPU Cooler that I've never done before um couldn't be that complicated I mean
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Corsair usually does a pretty bang up job of this kind of stuff so I found
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four screws and I found a back plate so
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let's assume the back plate goes on first and that it is not adjusted to the
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correct settings so I'm moving it one notch in to LGA
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1156 cuz this is a universal back plate it's compatible with 775 1156 and
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1366 so we're going to go over here if we have a case with a um uh with a a CPU
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back plate hole then this is where that really comes in handy because most
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aftermarket coolers um anyway the good ones are going to
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require a back plat so that they mount nice and uh nice and
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strong okay so we got to kind of adjust
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these just a little bit with that on there that's kind of interesting so I'm
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going to flip over my board uh so they don't line up quite the
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way that I had them adjusted that's one thing that can be a little bit finicky
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about Universal anything is that it tends to be sort
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of not quite without some fine
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adjustments so there we go just go ahead and make sure that's on there pretty
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good you know what I think one of them is not uh not in the right position
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still there we go so just wiggle those a
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bit Ah now you can see it's it doesn't
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have to stay in place as long as the holes are coming up and it's not putting
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any pressure on the mounting holes of the motherboard so there we've done that
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part we have a back plate
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success okay oh yeah another important tip for upgrading your heat sink is
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never leave an open bottle of rubbing alcohol sitting on the table because at
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some point you will knock it off and it
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will be bad will not be fun oh you have four
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little rubber grommets I wonder if those go on the back of the back
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plate I don't have the
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instructions I will be back in just a
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moment okay well I can't figure it out so let's assume it does nothing uh with
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some with some coolers the back plate is a necessary piece because the uh the the
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back plate sorry the uh the grommets are a necessary piece because the back plate
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doesn't have any non-conductive coating but this one does it has a plastic cover
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over the back plate so you don't have to worry about installing it there all
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right so here we are now we have this
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piece which is going to go through right here and then we will fix it to the heat
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sink sink with the four included
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screws there we are so this is fairly straightforward basically we're just
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taking the hold down plate and attaching it to the CPU
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Cooler and that's probably going to go in from the bottom based on how
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difficult this is if I try to do it this
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way there we are yeah you can see that screw holes
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are counter sunk so that yes you can
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install these screws from the bottom and
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should because that is how it is designed to
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work I don't really have a whole lot of commentary I already said everything
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that I really thought about this heat sink at the time that I uh unboxed it
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that's the thing about guides is if you do them in real time like on the camera
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as I tend to do all of my videos then
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there's a lot of like long
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pauses okay so uh this is the AMD mounting bracket which we will not need
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today now why don't we put on some thermal compound so here putting on
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thermal compound this is really easy you take your little syringe and then you go
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like this you zoom
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in there right that's enough that's probably more than enough I probably put
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on too much that's okay here I'll let you see how much I put
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on if my camera would focus that would be great there we are that is how much I
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put on it is probably too much but I mean I could make the argument that I
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can put on a little bit extra because there are some grooves in between the uh
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the heat pipes and the aluminum base of
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the heat sink so maybe we need to fill in more gaps that's my story and I'm
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sticking to it so I'm going to be installing a RAM fan so one thing that I
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want to be aware of is that I need enough room uh to the side of the cooler
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to install my RAM fan so there we are we place the cooler down on top of the back
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plate that's very straightforward and then we go ahead and
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tighten the thumb screws you always want to put the thumb
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screws on before actually uh like
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tightening them down with a lot of force see so I've just put them on they're not
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actually holding anything right now um that way you
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can uh tighten them all at the same time which is going to allow you to apply
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even pressure to your CPU throughout the mounting procedure which is uh going to
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reduce the chances of damaging it or your
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motherboard so you can see that these are thumb screws but they do have uh
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Philips head uh holes at the top so what
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I'll be doing is I'll be tightening up tightening them up just a little bit so
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finger tight right now all four if I want it to be um really anal retentive I
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could go in diagonals like this okay
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make sure we're tightening that up real good and then I'm going to go ahead and
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give them another however much with the screwdriver so yeah these are this is a
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good mounting system it's designed to only go as far as it needs to go
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so um you can't just here I'll show you what I mean in a sec there it's noted um
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so you see how the threading on the screws actually or on the back plate
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actually ends and the screws only go on as far as the threading goes so it means
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you can't overtighten it which is a really good
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feature so now let's go ahead and take the fan that's included with the
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A50 and we're going to orient the clips
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right here so that they're on the side where they uh clip into the heat sink
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and we're going to push it on just
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like like something just like that then we're
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going to take our CPU fan and we are going to either plug it
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straight into the motherboard header which is here there's our CPU
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motherboard header or we can plug it into this handy dandy noise reduction
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adapter which is basically just a resistor in line and then we can plug
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that in that was it that was the whole
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installation procedure for the Corsair A50 thank you for for checking it out
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