 No, could it be an air cooler from Corsair? I have so many questions. Why are they back? What are they trying to achieve? Is it any good? Who is our sponsor for this video? Just kidding, I know that one. Thermal Grizzly, Thermal Grizzly's conduct a not liquid metal thermal interface material offers maximum cooling performance. Check it out and keep things cool at the link in the video description. Corsair has formally reentered the air cooling ring with this, the A500 tower cooler. It has been nearly 10 years since Corsair launched a CPU heat sink. And since discontinuing the unexceptional A50 and A70, they've gone on to pretty much dominate the AIO water cooler market. So then why now? Why reenter a saturated segment that's already flush with excellent options? Here are our best guesses. One, simplicity sells. Installing a tower cooler is, well, simple compared to an AIO, and it has the extra benefit of fewer points of failure. Two, performance. Air coolers, as we've discussed on this channel before, perform as well or better than water coolers. And no pump means no pump noise for a quieter system. Usually, more on that later. And finally, number three, it's free real estate. Corsair already makes fans, so going a bit further to pair them with a cooler seems like an obvious move since going from zero sales in a category to anything sales in a category is an automatic W. And as an added bonus, it means that ultimate Corsair enthusiasts don't have to leave their comfort zone. On the surface, it seems like Corsair put a lot of thought into the overall design of the A500. The installation is well thought out, requiring no fan removal to access the mounting screws. And the attachment method is very similar to Noctua's Secufirm system, so big props there. I've actually been saying for years that in an industry where everyone is just copying each other, it's baffling that anybody mounts heat sinks in any way other than Secufirm. Out of the box, it just feels quality. Like, look at this, got all these notches. Look how polished these fan carriers are. They just slide off and slide on like that. That's freaking awesome. Oh, is that magnetic? I love it. With this thing completely gone are the days of dealing with annoying wire clips and bashed or sliced open knuckles on heat sink fins. For comparison, take a look at how janky the install process was on Corsair's A50 way back when Babylinus reviewed it. He is so cute. Look at his little cheeks. But those clothes. It's too bad he didn't have lttstore.com. So there's infinitely less fiddling involved with the new mounting system, and the plastic clip-on bezels are a major improvement over the old version too, so the design is nice. But does it perform? To find out, we built up a test platform with one of the hottest running consumer chips on the market, the Core i9-9900K, and we didn't overclock per se, but we left multi-core enhancement enabled, meaning it was able to kick out an excessive 200 watts, according to Hardware Info. At idle, as expected, all of our tower coolers performed within margin of error of each other. As for load temps, well, actually, this is looking pretty okay. So yeah, it's not as good as the 140 mil fan equipped NH-D15 or Assassin 3, but if larger 140 mil fans didn't perform better than 120 mil fans, then Noctua and Deepcool probably need to get their head in the game, which probably raises the question for you. Why did you choose these units for comparison? Well, here's the thing. The A500 is physically larger, and therefore it takes up more space in your system than a D15, and at its MSRP anyway, it actually costs a little bit more. So that's who you're up against, whether you like it or not. Now, it could make up for this if its acoustic performance was industry leading. So with our performance numbers in hand, we headed over to the SATMO chamber at SFU. By the way, guys, thank you so much, you're absolute legends for letting us use this place. It's got an incredibly low 28.5 decibel noise floor, and as it turns out, we needed every bit of it. Every cooler in front of me, not this one, was about as quiet as the inside of the chamber, which means that we would not have been able to measure their idle levels here in the studio. So, so far things are looking good for the A500 and its costly magnetic levitation bearing fans. Unfortunately, at full load, the situation changes drastically, and the A500 ended up sounding like it was gonna take off from the test bench. 48.8 decibels is an absolute deal breaker for a silence freak like me, and honestly ends up being, I mean, I don't wanna call it the final nail, because everything else about it is really good. So it's just like the coffin nail for this cooler, at least at its current price. Although Corsair has been known to run the odd promotion. TLDR then, I am baffled by other reviews of this cooler that end up recommending it for anything other than a Corsair themed PC. It's pretty and the sliding fan caddies are a novel solution, but at the end of the day, the performance of a cooler is a function of two metrics, thermal performance and acoustic performance. You can't say, yeah, this product is great if you just ignore one of them. And Corsair's decision not to use the space between the towers for a fan mount is a bit of a missed opportunity in my eyes, because if you can't compete on price and you can't compete on performance, you gotta at least try and be small or something. So here's what I want. I wanna see a price adjustment to better reflect the performance of the A500. Then I'd really like to see another attempt at a top tier high performance air cooler from Corsair, because I see a lot of the makings for a really killer product. Like, man, it looks great, it's easy to use, that's all good stuff. I just wanna see a little bit quieter operation as long as we don't have to wait 10 more years for it. Speaking of waiting 10 years, you won't have to wait that long for this segue to our sponsor. FreshBooks' cloud accounting solution is built for how you wanna work. Whether you're a freelancer or a small business owner, you can work anywhere with the FreshBooks mobile app. It allows you to create professional looking invoices on the go, snap pictures of your receipts so you don't lose them. Well, you might lose them, but you won't lose the pictures. And never miss an update. You can see when a client has viewed their invoice or when an invoice has become overdue. Start your 30 day free trial right now at freshbooks.com forward slash Linus Tech Tips. Well, that's what we have to say on the Corsair A500. If you wanna see some more cooler testing videos, why not check out our video covering air versus water cooling? We're gonna have that linked in the video description. Bye bye.