Corsair A50 and A70 Review

Testing and Setup:

Testing of the heatsink will involve applying a load simulated by Prime95 - using small FFTs in stock and overclocked scenarios. Both idle and load temperatures will be recorded. Load temperatures will be the maximum value displayed in RealTemp after running eight threads in Prime95 for one hour, and idle temperatures will be the minimum recorded value by RealTemp with no computer usage after one hour. The temperature values for each of the four cores will be averaged and displayed on the graphs below. The ambient temperature is held at a constant 25 °C throughout testing of the A50 and A70, as well as the comparison heatsinks. All the data shown in the graphs is in degrees Celsius. The included thermal paste from Corsair will be used during testing, and thermal pastes as packaged from the other coolers were used with each heatsink, respectively. The fans on both the A50 and A70 will be run at full speed for these tests.

Testing Setup:

• Processor: Intel i7 920 (Stock 2.66GHz and Overclocked to 3.40GHz @ 1.27V)
• Motherboard: MSI Eclipse SLI
• Memory: Mushkin Ridgeback 12800 6-8-6-24
• Video Card: NVIDIA GTX260
• Power Supply: Mushkin 800w Modular Power Supply
• Hard Drive: Seagate 1TB SATA
• Optical Drive: Lite-On DVD-RW
• OS: Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit
• Ambient Temperature: 25 °C
• CPU Heatsink: Corsair A50 and A70

Comparison Heatsinks:

• Stock Intel heatsink
• Thermalright HR-02
• Thermalright Silver Arrow
• Prolimatech Super Mega
• Cooler Master V6GT
• Thermaltake Contac29

The results here gave me a little bit of a surprise. The temperatures were quite a bit lower than I expected! Although they didn't outperform the big-name coolers that they were compared against, the A50 and A70 certainly hang close for their price points. I will wrap up this review on the next page in my conclusion.