Corsair Air Series A50 CPU Cooler Review

Installing the Corsair A50

The A50 comes with all that is needed to mount the cooler to AMD AM2 and AM3 sockets, as well as all Intel LGA sockets. The A50 also comes with an inline resistor to throttle the fan speed from 2000 RPM to 1600 RPM, and a tube of thermal paste.

The instructions are also quite nice. Even if you cant read the language, or at all for that matter, the illustrations are very well done and very clear.

I will be installing the A50 on our Core i7 test system. The Intel mounting parts consist of a backing plate, top strap and screws.

The backing plate is adjustable for the socket. Simply slide the post to the notch for your socket.

The bracket for the post has notches that hold the post in place quite nicely. So no fumbling around with keeping the posts lined up while installing it on the board. The backing plate also has a full cover insulation sheet.

The top plate mounts to the cooler base with 4 screws. The groves in the base top keep everything aligned correctly.

With HDT coolers the normal way of putting a pea size drop of thermal paste on the CPU doesnt work. The grooves in the cooler base suck up the paste and dont allow it to spread. So you either have to do the butter method and spread the paste on the CPU or, like in the image above, put small thin lines on each pipe then install the cooler.

With the cooler installed we can attach the fan and get the system reassembled.

The A50 cleared all the board components of the Intel DX58SO motherboard. The A50 is also like most tower coolers today. If the body of the cooler hangs over a RAM slot youre going to run into issues if youre using RAM with tall heat spreaders over 40mm in height.