all right everyone you might remember back at CES 2020 we talked about
Corsair getting back into the air-cooling game with the a500 and as
you can see I'm holding one right now it's it's one bit cooler guys like it's
bigger than my hand it's bigger than my face it's it's not a small guy it's big
now this is a pretty interesting move by Corsair because they're typically used
to pimping their AIO solutions but it seems like air cooling is making a bit
of a comeback because it offers good performance lower pricing and it's less
hassle what some of you might not remember though is that the a500 isn't
Corsair's first air cooler in fact about a decade ago there a50 and a70 heat
sinks were launched that was targeted towards the entry-level market and they
offered pretty good price to performance at the time fast-forward to 2020 and
we're here with the a500 now at $100 u.s. this new heatsink really isn't a
budget product about any stretch of the imagination and it competes against some
of the big boys for example the Noctua DH15 chrome Max bequiet dark Rock
Pro for Andy not to a nagu 12 a all go for about $100 - and we're gonna be
including all of those in the comparison so of course there definitely needs to
bring their a-game to the table here also full disclosure Corsair is one of
our main channel sponsors so they did approached us earlier to make an axe
bond for the a500 but we decided to test us thoroughly beforehand I'm pretty sure
you've seen a lot of videos covering this cooler but we've actually been
working really hard on updating our testing methodologies so we're gonna be
doing things a little bit differently in this video giving you a little bit more
in-depth real-world use case scenarios so let's actually find out if the a500
is really worth its price point but first a quick message from our sponsor
the new Phanteks p300 enclosure is a great value airflow focused frame thanks to
the all-new mesh front panel that is a single piece of metal for highest mesh
area and durability the inside is nice and simple plus an exhaust fan is
included check out the p 308 down below alright so opening up the package
courser gives you a small tool box with clearly labeled mounting kits for AMD
and Intel platforms there's also a full tube of thermal compound a braided fan
sputter cable and some zip ties I've got vishay Corsair for at least including a
screwdriver now even though Corsair included a tube of thermal compound
they've also pre applied some in a grid pattern while this looks good for Intel
2066 CPUs and in DCPS we noticed that this pattern would overhang Intel's
LGA 1151 processors moving on to the cooler itself and honestly guys it looks
pretty different since instead of using cheap metal clips for two vents courses
actually using these plastic brackets they can just slide on and off without
messing around way too much and since the fans are just mounted with screws
swapping them out is pretty easy too now when you take out the fans and remove
the top bracket you basically greeted with a pretty basic cooler with four
heat pipes that run up in two small and individual fin erase 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 the heat
pipe direct touch base is also a bit ought to since Corsair says that the
a500 can handle heat loads up to 250 watts but usually this type of designs
used for coolers with lower ratings most of the high in heat sinks from
coolermaster deep cool be quite and not to have more traditional bases and they
look really good compared to Corsairs offering here another issue with this
type of base is it's very hard to get a good contact between the IHS and the
cooler which becomes pretty evident when you put a straight edge on it or after
the heat sinks uninstall from your cpu we've seen three a500's now and every
one has a minor base variants like this one so it isn't unique to just one
sample alright so moving on to installation and honestly guys it looks
a lot like not to his process and I guess that's a good thing
so installation is pretty straightforward but there were some
challenges too let's start with the size the a500 is basically a dual 120
millimeter fan design but what the fan mounting system it actually takes up a
lot of space especially when compared to similar coolers like the Noctua Nhu 12a
now that doesn't cause problems with GPU mounting but it does have an impact on
memory clearance noctua doesn't have that since the you 12 a slightly offset
towards the motherboard IO area for higher memory kits without modifying the
fan position and I think this brilliantly designed Corsair on the
other hand is a centered setup which means that if you have a taller memory
kit like their Dominator modules you need to move the fan upwards now sure
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 plus the increased height
could cost compatibility problems with some cases you should also take note
that on aim for platform you can't mount this cooler of any vertical orientation
not that you'd want to anyways since that would run its airflow contrary to
most difficult cases on X to 99 things can get pretty tight too but only
between the a500 and GPUs with black plates or if you have the memory slots
fully populated okay so I'm gonna move on to testing but I also want to go over
our testing methodology so I invite you to check out our full procedure that's
available on our website and I leave a link to that in the description down
below first off we're using Intel's Core I 9 10 9 8 exe at stock settings and
also overclock to 4.5 gigahertz on all course at that speed we've logged it
sucking down just over 210 watts which is perfect to test this cooler we're
also trying to replicate a real-world QC 8 scenario and so we decided to
eliminate an open Testament set up especially with coolers mounted in a
horizontal orientation because both of those factors can skew results and cover
up poor performance so testing is done in a closed frackle design metric line
s2 that's equipped with two intake and one exhaust fan operating at a constant
600 rpm this whole setup is put under very strict temperature conditions so
testing only begins once the interior case temperatures have stabilised at 25
degrees Celsius and then the exterior room temperature
or the ambient temperature is maintained at 22 degrees Celsius another important
thing to note here is that all of our results represent the best temperature
after two separate mounts since there are variables when it comes to
installing coolers so we wanted to make sure that a bad installation doesn't
impact results finally we're using the Arctic MX for thermal compound for every
test if you're wondering there's only about a 1 degree difference between
Corsairs stock compound and DMX 4 all right so starting things off with the
stock CPU speeds and the default fan profile from our Asus x2 9 and
motherboard which by the way dynamically increases fan speeds as temperature
rises and the a 500 puts in a very respectable result it beats - you told a
and dark rock Pro for by a narrow margin but it trails lead less expensive you
14s now unfortunately to get to that point
it's also the loudest cooler here but also remember that under 30 decibels
from about two feet away is still pretty quiet bumping up the cooler fans to a
constant thousand rpm and it becomes pretty obvious that in the stock test
Corsair relies on higher fan speeds in order to get those lower temperatures on
the other hand other heats things actually see their temperatures reduced
here two courses credit the a500 actually becomes the quietest option but
you need to sacrifice temperatures to get there now with the fans going full
out at 2400 rpm Corsair is able to beat the U 12 a but it also is beaten by a
bunch of coolers that operate at lower maximum speeds I also remember that the
utopias fans are rated for a maximum 2,000 rpm which is 20% slower than the a
500 but it only losses by 3 degrees at full speed this thing is loud guys like
really really loud to a point where it almost matches the kraken X 62 all
rights now on to overclocked testing which will really put Corsairs claim to
the test and this is the reason why we've named the cpu test system the
Widowmaker the heat pushed out by this old clock 1080 XE is just insane guys
and the a500 couldn't handle things it was overwhelmed in less than 10
minutes and ended up reaching the 110 degrees CPU throttle limit another thing
you guys will see him these overclocking tests is the Nhu 14s getting closer to
its thermal saturation limit and it's beaten by the u 12a that's single 140
millimeter fan that was so good in stock testing just isn't enough now switching
to acoustics yeah that's a hard fail for the a500 guys since it's even working
at 100% fan speed according to these decibel readings the U 14s and u 12a
were also going along at 100% but they actually passed this test if the a500
failed in the first test it was going to fail here as well but it only took two
minutes to reach critical temperatures guys it's really amazing to see even not
to a you talk a of waiting throttling though I'd never run my CPU at 101
degrees in the first place now when our full speed test I was
hoping the coarser cooler to pass but unfortunately this one was a complete
fail again so at this point in testing we wanted to try out one more thing to
test out a theory about Corsairs poor performance now sure the 1080 XE is one
of the hottest one chips around especially when it's overclocked but
according to Corsair the a500 is rated for 250 watts and the other coolers in
this comparison feature that same spec but they spanked the a 500 pretty hard
so in came B Noctua 8 well fans from the u 12 a installed onto Corsair brackets
you see the FF nerds fans of optimized for static pressure and they're usually
used for pushing air through super dense AIO radiator fins but this heatsink fins
aren't super close together and that void in the middle could cause problems
for airflow moment the 812 have a lower static pressure rating but they can move
a lot more air at lower rpms too so let's check it out at stock CPU settings
at 1,000 rpm fan speed there is a massive temperature drop when moving to
the new fans but let's move on to the overclocked performance setting here at
100 cent fan speed Corsair is still beaten clean but the tuned octo fans
allow it to hit lower temps and completely avoids throttling that's
pretty impressive what sort of bad news for Corsairs fan selection so the
numbers really do speak for themselves and I guess it's time to wrap up this
video you see it's pretty obvious that the a500 is designed to compete against
similarly priced alternatives but only on lower T V processors as you saw from
our baseline testing this cooler did reasonably well but when you start
pushing things especially when it comes to overclocking that's where this thing
starts to fall apart overall the 8500 is simply louder hotter running and cost is
just as much as the other coolers on the market rated for 250 watts like the u 12
a V T 15 and the DARPA Rock pro 4 and that's just not good enough to be
competitive in this market especially when you can buy the knocked o you 14 s
along with an extra fan for about the same price now I do have to give credit
to Corsair for thinking out of the box for implementing this slide on fan
bracket mechanism it's pure genius and it's coming clutch for us when we were
installing coolers inside case goes trust me 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 now if you really like the looks of this cooler and if you
don't have a lot of space in your case for the bigger cooler side compared to
like a knock to add eh 15 then maybe just maybe but this wouldn't be my first
choice so on that note thank you so much for watching make sure to check out some
relevant content over here subscribe hit that notification bell i'm Ebor with
hurricane axe signing off and i'll talk to you guys in the next one