 I've been asked on a number of times to do CPU heat sink installation tutorials So I'm going to start with one on the Corsair a50. So this is their mainstream CPU cooler You can see it is a three thick eight millimeter heat pipe direct touch tower heat sink That's actually fairly straightforward, so we'll start with the CPU in the socket that is a core i7 875 K unlocked so the first two things we're going to need are some TP in this case Charmin very very soft very nice, and we will also need some rubbing alcohol, so Go ahead and open that up rubbing alcohol is going to allow you to remove the old thermal compound and not leave behind any nasty residue So go ahead get some rubbing alcohol on there and then wipe off the old thermal compound Honestly it doesn't have to be perfect as long as you do a reasonably good job What I usually do is all I'll wipe off as much as I can with the wet part of the of the toilet paper or paper towel or whatever I happen to be using and then I'll go back and grab a fresh piece and Then just Wipe off any sort of random residue that might be left so that gets our CPU nice and clean And ready for the next stage so you can see it's all You can't see that never mind okay, so the next stage is to Put on whatever brackets are required in order to mount the CPU so I've never mounted this cooler before so this is going to be a bit of a journey of discovery for me Trying to mount a CPU cooler that I've never done before Couldn't be that complicated I mean Corsair usually does a pretty bang-up job of this kind of stuff So I found four screws and I found a backplate So let's assume the backplate goes on first and that it is not adjusted to the correct settings So I'm moving it one notch in to LGA 1156 Because this is a universal backplate. It's compatible with 775 1156 and 1366 so we're going to go over here if we have a case with a With a CPU backplate hole then this is where that really comes in handy because most aftermarket coolers Anyway the good ones are going to require a backplate so that they mount nice and nice and strong Okay, so we've got to kind of adjust these just a little bit with that on there That's kind of interesting, so I'm going to flip over my board So they don't line up quite the way that I had them adjusted That's one thing that can be a little bit finicky about universal anything is that it tends to be sort of Not quite without some fine adjustments, so there we go Just go ahead and make sure that's on there pretty good. You know what I think one of them is not Not in the right position still there we go, so just wiggle those a bit Now you can see it doesn't have to stay in place as long as the holes are coming up And it's not putting any pressure on the mounting holes of the motherboard So there we've done that part We have a backplate success Okay, oh yeah another important tip for upgrading your heatsink is never leave an open bottle of rubbing alcohol Sitting on the table because at some point you will knock it off, and it will be bad Will not be fun You have four little rubber grommets. I wonder if those go on the back of the backplate I don't have the instructions I Will be back in just a moment Okay, well I can't figure it out, so let's assume it does nothing with some with some coolers the backplate is a necessary piece because the The backplate sorry the the grommets are a necessary piece because the backplate doesn't have any non-conductive coating But this one does it has a plastic cover over the backplate, so you don't have to worry about installing it there All right, so here. We are now we have this piece Which is going to go through right here, and then we will affix it to the heatsink with the four included screws There we are so this is fairly straightforward basically We're just taking the hold down plate and attaching it to the CPU cooler And that's probably going to go in from the bottom based on how difficult this is if I try to do it this way There we are Yeah, you can see those screw holes are countersunk so that yes you can install these screws from the bottom and Should because that is how it is designed to work Don't really have a whole lot of commentary. I already said everything that I really thought about this heatsink at the time that I unboxed it That's the thing about guides If you do them in real time like on the camera as I tend to do all of my videos then There's a lot of like long pauses Okay, so this is the AMD mounting bracket which we will not need today Now why don't we put on some thermal compound so here putting on thermal compound? This is really easy you take your little syringe and you put on some thermal compound You take your little syringe and then you go like this You zoom in There that's enough that's probably more than enough I probably put on too much. That's okay here I'll let you see how much I put on My camera would focus that would be great there we are That is how much I put on it is probably too much But I mean I could make the argument that I can put on a little bit extra because there are some grooves in between the the heat pipes and The aluminum base of the heatsink so maybe we need to fill in more gaps. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it So I'm going to be installing a ram fan So one thing that I want to be aware of is that I need enough room To the side of the cooler to install my ram fan there. We are we place the cooler down on top of the backplate that's very straightforward and Then we go ahead and tighten the thumb screws You always want to put the thumb screws on before actually like Tightening them down with a lot of force See so I've just put them on they're not actually holding anything right now that way you can Tighten them all at the same time which is going to allow you to apply even pressure to your CPU Throughout the mounting procedure which is going to reduce the chances of damaging it or your motherboard So you can see that these are thumb screws, but they do have a Phillips head Holes at the top so what I'll be doing is I'll be tightening them that tightening them up just a little bit so finger tight Right now all four if I want to be Really anal retentive I could go in diagonals like this Okay, make sure we're tightening that up real good, and then I'm going to go ahead and Give them another however much with the screwdriver so yeah, these are this is a good mounting system It's designed to only go as far as it needs to go so You can't just here. I'll show you what I mean in a sec there. It's mounted So you see how the threading on the screws actually are on the backplate actually ends and The screws only go on as far as the threading goes so it means you can't over tighten it which is why I'm doing this So now let's go ahead and take the fan that's included with the a50 and we're going to Orient the clips right here so that they're on the side where they clip into the heat sink and We're going to push it on just like Like something Just like that then we're going to take our CPU fan and We are going to take our CPU fan and we are going to either plug it straight into the motherboard header Which is here? There's our CPU motherboard header, or we can plug it into this handy-dandy noise reduction adapter Which is basically just a resistor in line, and then we can plug that in That was it. That was the whole installation procedure for the Corsair a50 Thank you for checking it out, and don't forget to subscribe to my video blog