Corsair A500 CPU Cooler Review

Closing Thoughts

We got our first glimpse of the Corsair A500 at CES 2020 and the guys were pretty impressed with its appearance. Corsair marketed the A500 as a high-end CPU air cooler, with thermal dissipation performance to rival some of the current market leaders. This is something you often hear from manufacturers and a lot of the time it can be just marketing spiel. However, their claims are accurate, so hats off to Corsair in that respect.

The first thing you notice about the Corsair A500 when you take it out of the box is its premium appearance and feel. It is instantly noticeable that it has been built using high-quality materials, has a good weight to it and the understated appearance looks very sleek. We have no doubt that it would fit the style of almost any type of modern PC system build.

Not only does it look great, in terms of thermal dissipation it performs very well too. During our testing, the Corsair A500 could more than adequately cool the Intel Core-i9 9900K processor we use in our test bench, which is no mean feat. The Intel Core i9-9900k is a demanding processor to cool, especially when the all-core frequency is pushed to 4.9 GHz and the CPU is pulling close to 180W of power. Regardless of this, the A500 handled cooling with ease, which is very impressive.

Corsair claim to have implemented a simple and quick installation method in the A500 and that is true. Installation on our socket 115X test bench took around 10 minutes, which included fitting a backplate to the motherboard. On AMD systems, installation time should be significantly shorter since the A500 utilises the stock AMD backplate retention method. The mounting system of the fans and fan height adjustment is well thought out too with a sliding mechanism that's used. No more fiddly spring clips holding the fans to the heatsink is something we really liked.

While the Corsair A500 performs excellent in terms of thermal dissipation, this does come at a cost, which is the noise levels of the fans. At 100% speed (2400 RPM) the A500 fans are extremely loud, to a point where they become annoying. If you look at the result of our thermal test at 4.9 GHz, the A500 provides just 1°C improvement over the Noctua NH-D15. However, the A500 produces 7dBA more noise than the NH-D15 which is very noticeable and would be irritating to users sat close to the PC for long periods.

Over the last year, I have tested many CPU coolers with various noise levels. To give you an idea of just how loud the fans are, while I was testing the Corsair A500 my wife arrived home from work and the first thing she said was “what is that noise?”. This is something that has not happened before while testing a CPU cooler – my wife doesn’t have what you would call sensitive hearing normally and she was in a different room to where I was testing.

So if you or someone that you live with has sensitive hearing, then the Corsair A500 may not be for you, especially if the fans are likely to be running at 100% RPM for long periods. However, the fans can be set to operate in PWM mode, meaning the speed will adjust based on CPU temperature. If your system’s CPU is running at stock core frequency, the fan noise may well be more subtle and less annoying, which may make the A500 a more attractive proposition.

If you are simply looking for raw thermal dissipation performance and don’t care about noise levels, in terms of raw thermal performance, the Corsair A500 is the best performing CPU air cooler according to our testing and is priced around a similar amount to other rival CPU air coolers of this style. So for its raw thermal performance and attractive appearance, our opinion is that the Corsair A500 is worth buying.

The Corsair A500 is available to pre-order for £89.99 from Overclockers UK HERE.

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Pros

• Attractive understated appearance.
• Excellent raw thermal dissipation performance.
• Quick and simple installation process.
• High quality build and finish.

Cons

• Noise levels high with fans set at maximum RPM.

KitGuru says: The Corsair A500 provides excellent raw cooling performance, great looks and a speedy installation method. However, noise levels can become loud when the fans are running at full speed, so it may not prove suitable for everyone.