 Today I'll be doing a quick unboxing of the Corsair cooling air Series a 50 so this is a performance CPU cooler not to be confused with what I have over here Which is the a 70? Which is classified as a high Performance CPU cooler, so this is performance. This is high performance. There are a couple of key differences So what I'll probably end up doing is taking them both out to do a quick comparison for you They both feature two-year warranty as well as compatibility with the LGA 775 1156 1366 core core am3 am2 and am3 As well as compatibility with 120 millimeter fans Corsairs 120 mil fans are generally pretty good quality So I'd expect this one to be much more of the same you can either select 1600 or 2000 rpm on the fan and here we have a Little performance graph compared to your stock cooler. I can't help but wonder what stock cooler. They were using oh here We go core i7 965 processor running at stock 3.2 gigahertz so actually the LGA 1366 Cooler that comes with the 965 is a pretty decent cooler So if it outperforms that one by a significant margin you can rest assured it will outperform your 1156 775 or AMD stock cooler, so let's take the packaging off Just like this look at that. I didn't need a nice at all That's still zoomed in yeah, that's why you can't see them here there we go much better So the box is actually similar in size to the a70 but a little bit shorter Okay, so you got about about two to three centimeters there in terms of extra shortness or Less length if you prefer they're both the same Sideways dimensions, so it's not really bigger in that regard Go ahead and open up the top here have a look at what's inside with the a70 I tried to guess what was inside all the boxes this time. Hopefully. I'll be a little bit more accurate, okay I'm gonna guess that in here is accessories Now if I sure wish I could get this stuff out of here that would there we go All right, so inside the box we will find Something to get the Box out of the light we will find all of the accessories so we have a 120 millimeter fan which comes with their Shroud slash clip that I actually really like it makes fan mounting a breeze, and it's also got nice anti-vibration rubber grommets mounting the fan to the frame We've also got the am2 am3 hold down Thermal compound some screws rubber washers and a fan speed adapter fan speed well fan noise Reduction adapter so that'll turn your fan speed down presumably to 1600 rpm Here's a Corsair solutions guide outlining all of their different solutions including memory solutions cooling solutions power chassis USB and Storage solutions it's gone to the point where as per their dream machine campaign you can actually almost build a PC Entirely out of course our parts, so here's their back plate for Intel Here's a little plastic piece to keep the motherboard components on the back from being shorted out You can adjust these clips here to go from 775 to 1156 to 1366 quite easily And then there's a hold down for the top side along with some screws Perfect, so that's all of our mounting accessories as well as our fan accessories. I'm gonna hold on to the fan for now Yeah, there we go hold on to the fan and let's have a look at the cooler itself so it comes packed in foam Just like that it comes with a little Quickstart guide which I guess shows you how to install it on the socket of your choice That's too much thermal compound. I would probably put on about half of that but A plus for effort Corsair I Mean they're not wrong the only disadvantage is that you're gonna get some thermal goop around the edges of your CPU And like it's kind of it's kind of hard to clean off of there It won't damage anything, but it's just a pain when you're trying to clean off the CPU to I don't know put it back in a Box or whatever it is you need to do do not return this product to the store Of course there wants to cover all of the technical support customer service Etc themselves Don't eat this and Then we have the cooler so it's quite a bit smaller than the a 70 right off the bat You've got the same black top that I really liked on the a 70 So you've got three heat pipes coming up through it and then instead of seeing a standard silver or chromed top You've got a nice black one Which will go really well with the black interior and the corsair 800d the fins are quite tightly spaced But as long as the fan has reasonably good static pressure Which it better because it's I believe the same one that they're using on the h50 Then you should get fairly good performance out of it that way the fan clips on that easily. That's how hard it is So you just flip it on? And then you can pull it off and flip it on and pull it off But it is secure enough that it's not just gonna fall off So here if I take the heat sink and shake it around like if it was being shipped on a truck There doesn't fall off excellent. All right. I was hoping it wouldn't fall off. Then we've got the bottom of the heat sink So this is where we see it as a heat pipe direct touch heat sink. So that That means that it will survive a fall from Approximately six inches above the table and it will not be damaged because it is engineered like that Okay, so I'm just distracting you right now while I pull the a 70 out of its box so that I can do a quick comparison Against its little brother the a 50 Here we are All right, it looks a lot bigger, but it's not actually that much bigger It's just because of the additional bulk from the fans. I mean, it's a little bit bigger But anyway, let's finish off with the a 50 here. So I'll do the obligatory finger shot It's not all that shiny, but it does look quite flat although my my unmeasured Appearance oh meter is not going to give us too good an indication of that But I would expect it to be reasonably well manufactured I mean that is one of the things that is tough about heat pipe direct touch though Is that when you're manufacturing you do have to make sure that it is aligned completely precisely all of the heat pipes and that they are aligned precisely with the base because What you do is you assemble the whole thing mush it all together and then you have to actually Flatten the whole thing as a whole so if you go too far You'll go inside the heat pipes heat pipes are not solid they are hollow and usually full of some kind of a gas Slash liquid because that's what allows it to transfer heat so quickly So if you go too far you puncture a heat pipe rendering the whole thing useless And if you don't go far enough, then you're going to lose some of the efficiency of actually having the heat sink Directly on top of the heat spreader of the CPU Oh look, oh there's Corsair logos on the bottom too There's a nice finishing touch for you. You'll never see it in all likelihood, but it's there You'll know it's there, and that'll make you feel better Okay, so here we are we can compare the two heat sinks against each other So the first thing you'll notice in terms of difference is that the a70 looks much bigger because of the big fan I already mentioned that the next thing you'll notice is that it has more heat pipes So it has some heat pipes that are a little bit smaller than the a70 So it has 33% more heat pipes and in theory 33% more performance Although it probably doesn't quite work out that way Let's just strip the fans off them so you can see just how much thicker it is I can also tell already that it has quite a bit more surface area in terms of fins too Because what they've done with the a50 is they've actually gone a little bit Okay, yeah, you can see it has a slightly different shape to it So no, you can't really see that Okay, I guess the only difference here is that the a50 only has the one side that you can clip the fan to That's kind of interesting So rather than being shaped the same on both sides like the a70 because the a70 is designed to have a fan clipped either side You can see clip marks here here here and here The a50 can only accept a fan on the one side. This side is actually flat That's why it looked like there was actually less fin material on this side of the heat pipes to me But it's not actually the case although it is quite a bit thinner. So, you know what? It's hard to say how much performance difference you'd see but Maybe I'll have to actually test these and find out just how well they do Maybe I'll test them against the co gauge arrow here, which is this enormous monstrosity thing. So Um, yeah, okay well enough speculation. They both use nice fat eight millimeter heat pipes So that's a really good thing to see so even though this one only is a three heat pipe cooler It's going to do quite a bit better than a heat pipe cooler that uses only six millimeter heat pipes Thank you for checking out my unboxing of the corsair a50 cpu heatsink and I hope you enjoyed it Don't forget to subscribe both to linus tech tips as well as ncixcom my other official ncix channel And thank you for watching