A Closer Look
High Tech, Low Temps
The CORSAIR A500 boasts quad direct-contact copper heat pipes to draw heat away from your CPU, dual magnetic levitation bearing fans for provide superb customizable airflow and pre-applied CORSAIR XTM50 thermal material for optimal heat transfer.
Intuitive Slide-and-lock Fan Mount System
Variable mounting height for wide DRAM compatibility and easy installation.
This is the answer to any compatibility problems. If you have extremely tall RAM then just slide that fan a little bit out of the way and you are good to go.
Cool, Quiet, and Everything in-between
Adjust the two included high-performance ML120 PWM fans anywhere from 400 RPM to 2,400 RPM and strike your perfect balance between ultra-quiet operation and extreme cooling.
Corsair HoldFast Retention System
Easy to install, ensuring consistent thermal performance with a secure and reliable fit on almost all modern AMD & Intel CPUs.*
This mounting system is a breeze to use.
Efficient Heat Transfer
Pre-applied high-performance CORSAIR XTM50 Thermal Paste applied in an optimized pattern ensures even heat transfer. And just in case you want to re-apply it or re-install your A500, we’ve included an extra tube in the box.
Lets move on to the and check out the Performance and Software!
Performance
Test setup and Testing Methodology
The system used for testing is listed in the table below. Ambient temperatures were kept at 24 degrees Celsius +/- 1 degree. The thermal paste used was Noctua’s NT-H2 (for testing consistency). The cool and quite mode was disabled to prevent the CPU idling at lower voltages to attain accurate temperatures at idle. The fan speed was set to Full. The idle temperatures were recorded after 10 minutes of idle and max temperatures were recorded after a 5 minute torture test using Adia 64 System Stability Test and recording the Cores values.
| CPU | Intel Core i5-8600K @ 3.6GHz (Coffee Lake) |
| Cooling | Corsair A500 |
| Motherboard | Asus ROG Maximus X Hero Z370 |
| Ram | Zadak Spark RGB DDR4-4133 32GB Kit |
| HDD | Samsung 960 EVO 250GB PCIE M.2 SSD |
| PSU | Thermaltake Toughpower Grand RGB 850W |
| OS | Windows 10 |
Now we get to the good stuff the results. I apologize for my cooling catalogue being rather slim, but as more coolers come in we will continue to grow this list. As you can see in the graph below we have the Idle temps for the A500. This chip hovers at a cool 25 degrees Celsius. Almost ambient temps!
Alright LOAD temps! The ones that really matter. The A500 performed pretty well coming in at 52 degrees Celsius. Only time will tell where this cooler will rank in future tests but I am pretty confidant it will compete with the best of them as the cooler manages to crank out decent temps! And to note all these other benchmarks are from AIO’s. This is the only air cooler I have tested with this particular setup.
Noise can be a important factor for some. If we have a open case design and the fans might be exposed, we don not want record setting noise coming from our cooler. This not the case with the Cougar Aqua 240. As you can see in the graph above the fans at full speed hit 34 dBs. Just to note, the actually hearable noise from the fans are not distracting at all.
Now lets move on to the Conclusion and Verdict!
