Corsair – the company who has brought us seemingly endless options of AIO liquid cooler models for the masses, has recently introduced their first large air cooling option, the A500. The dual-fan, monolithic heatpipe cooler is also devoid of another Corsair staple: RGB/aRGB lighting, meaning the new Corsair A500 is either a welcome change or a deal breaker, depending on which camp you defend.
Features
Corsair ships the A500 with a quality set of mounting hardware, including nicely plated mounting studs and securing nuts as well as a very robust, laser-cut steel backplate. Cable ties are a welcome addition, as is the 2-way PWM splitter and Phillips screwdriver included in the box.
And while the A500 does ship with pre-applied thermal paste, an additional syringe of XTM50 thermal compound is provided for future re-installs of the cooler. Corsair covers the A500 with a 5-year warranty.
The most interesting feature of the A500 is its pair of non-RGB ML120 fans nested within a set of molded frames which ride on friction rails on either side of the cooler tower. Fans are pre-installed out of the box in a standard push+pull configuration, eliminating any confusion around fan and airflow direction.
The A500 features a quartet of plated heatpipes to dissipate thermal load from the base of the cooler throughout the thermal tower. The mounting plate comes permanently affixed to the base and utilizes a pair of tension-screws to secure to the cooler’s included cross-bar frames.
Access to the tension screws is gained by removing the attractive, brushed-aluminum top plate bearing the Corsair logo by popping it free of cooler tower. The center of the tower fin stack has a central cutaway to allow the Phillips screwdriver direct access through this channel to the tension screws of the base.
Corsair ships the A500 with a pre-applied patch of thermal compound in grid layout. The four direct-contact heatpipes of the cooler are integrated into the plated mounting base. The central cutaway is also visible here, showing how the tension screws are accessed via this channel.
We clean every cooler base of pre-installed thermal compound using alcohol wipes and cloth and later use Arctic MX-4 for all of our tests. During this process, we noticed a small irregularity of the direct-contact heatpipes along the base of the A500. One of the heatpipes (second from the left) is slightly raised when compared with the others in our sample, which is easily seen with a steel straightedge and some backlighting.
The thermal compound contact patch shows the representation of this impact when the cooler is installed, leaving one of the direct contact heatpipes elevated just slightly to isolate it from CPU IHS contact. This also means that this single heatpipe can only ‘work’ by absorbing heat from remainder of the cooler base and the adjacent (raised) heatpipe, instead of directly removing it from the processor.
Making use of the removable top plate, installing the A500 is quite a simple task and one which does not require the cooler’s fans to be removed, which is typically a requirement with other large air coolers. Larger memory DIMMs can be accounted for with a bit of vertical adjustment of the fans, although this may only be required with the tallest of memory sticks.
We tested the Corsair A500 against peers of similar price and relative size, specifically the be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 4, DeepCool Gamer Storm Assassin III and Noctua NH-U12A. All have been evaluated on our i7-5930k test bench running at 4.20 Ghz @ 1.20v paired with 16GB of DDR-2400 Crucial Ballistix on our MSI X99S XPower AC motherboard.
Note that while our cooling platform is old at this point, the CPU’s 140W TDP, combined with a healthy overclock, still gives today’s coolers a tough workout. That said, we are planning to update our cooling testbed once Intel’s latest Comet Lake-S CPUs and accompanying motherboards arrive.
Both the Corsair A500 and Noctua NH-U12A utilize a pair of 120mm fans, which does account for slightly higher thermal load temperatures than the be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 4 utilizing a 135mm + 120mm fan and the dual 140mm DeepCool Gamer Storm Assassin III.
Use of smaller 120mm fans by the A500 and the NH-U12A gives us higher measured fan RPM while larger fans will usually spin more slowly. Since the Dark Rock Pro 4 features two fans of different diameters, we’ve listed them separately as we did from our original coverage of this cooler.
The 2400+ RPM fans on the Corsair A500 kick up a lot of turbulence, leading to elevated decibel levels, but considering we’ve seen similar results on the Corsair H100i Pro lineup, this comes as no surprise.
Acoustic efficiency evaluates how coolers in our tests perform when we combine thermal performance and noise level, essentially building a graph of how well a cooler does work and how acoustically efficient it is during that process.
With the Corsair A500 priced right at $100, it struggles with some of its peers due to noise level and a few degrees of thermal separation. Both the Corsair A500 and the Noctual NH-U12A are priced around 10% higher than the be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 4 and the DeepCool Gamer Storm Assassin III, also creating more separation in our performance value chart.
Thermal imaging from our FLIR ONE Pro camera shows some notable differences of heat soak at 50% fan speed seen in the center cooler cutout vent as well as an indication of additional thermal buildup at the exhaust fan (left of the center logo). Overall, the mass of the cooling fin stack shows equalization in both photos, providing indication that the cooler is effectively distributing thermal loads evenly through the A500.
Corsair have positioned themselves in a way which allows its customers another choice that retains the triple-sail logo while alleviating the fears of liquid cooling and maintaining brand loyalty. The A500 isn’t the highest-performing cooler for big-air money, so unless you are a Corsair loyalist, it’s a difficult option to recommend considering other options available.
We also have some concerns around the irregularities in the milling of the direct-contact heatpipes as we know we aren’t the only ones to have encountered this problem. It makes us wonder if there would be marked performance improvement if this build anomaly were corrected, and we’re hopeful that Corsair will correct the issue in future retail updates.