Corsair A500 CPU air cooler review

Cooling 189 Page 12 of 12 Published by

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Final Words & Conclusion

Final words

The reviewed Corsair A500 displayed good performance and handled even an overclocked Core i9 9900K processor at 5.0 GHz with increased voltage, but you need to remember that this is a CPU model with soldered heat spreader (not the standard for Intel’s CPUs). The most outstanding thing about this product is the care with which it has been built. You get a single-block heatsink with an excellent finish and a premium design. It has an aluminum plate in the upper section, which gives it a discreet and elegant appearance at any angle. One of this Corsair’s selling points is RGB lighting, it's not there. You won’t find any, because the ML120s don’t have any backlight. Including the Corsair RGB, range fans would have made the product very expensive we think, is the reason.

The range of RPMs is impressive, but the noise levels are just about average. You can set the fans as low as 400 (inaudible), up to 2400 (well, that’s a lot of noise). If you find a good curve (or select an appropriate pre-defined setup), you won’t be disappointed with the results. You need to remember that, the ML series fans offer quite a bit of airflow at low RPM, by design. Thou shalt not forget about the five years warranty, either, very commendable, but then again there really aren't a lot of parts on there that can fail either.



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The mounting solution for the fans is pretty darn terrific. The manufacturer decided to use a system of integral frames to introduce rails that allow the fans to move up and down, which makes the product compatible with all types of RAM modules, however high they may be.

 

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Conclusion

The Corsair A500 is available at an MSRP of 99.99 USD. It’s a bit steep for the provided cooling and overall noise performance (that is tweakable I'll say once more). The design in terms of aesthetics are great, quality is on par with Corsair, but overall the acoustics level we do need to write down as a negative side-note. You'll end up manually creating an RPM fan profile that should not exceed 400~500 RPM. If you do that, it's all good though it would have an effect on cooling capacity. You won’t get RGB functionality here which in the year 2020 feels a little naked to even say. Oh my, how things have changed. We like the five years of warranty and love the compatibility with high-end (and tall) RAM modules. On the other hand, the cooler is rather big, so you might have problems fitting it in some cases (the height is 169 mm, which is quite fair). The installation process went perfectly smoothly. So, summing it all up, the Corsair A500 deserves the “Recommended” award: for good performance, acceptable price and reasonable noise levels, very easy installation, great quality and features, and a generous, five-year warranty. The bottom line is that Corsair probably needs to address the default acoustic levels (and perhaps the size of this thing can be a drawback for many of you). Smaller versions are more than welcome, as even without fan adjustments you'll need a chassis compatible with 169 mm high CPU cooler and that's not so common, especially in the lower/mid-end. The cooling performance overall though is pretty darn good in D15 territory, that noise level, however, is too much. 

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