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The Corsair A50 and A70 coolers arrive in two very stylish boxes, an identical design ethic we noted with the AX1200 Power Supply review. While its not often we compliment box art, we feel these are really helping Corsair cement their standing as a company to take seriously.
Both coolers are encased in heavy duty protective foam and the fans and accessories are placed inside a seperate cardboard container.
The A70 is supplied with two 120mm Corsair branded fans, and the less expensive A50 is supplied with a solitary fan.
These fans are high quality models, which are sold as low noise, low vibration models mounted on rubber studs and the speeds are selectable between 1,600 and 2,000 rpm so you can ascertain your own performance to noise ratio, we will analyse noise levels later in the review.
Cleverly these fans are attached to a plastic shroud which makes fitting extremely easy. Corsair don't take any chances either as the two fans supplied with the A70 have the shrouds mounted in a push airflow mode on one fan and a pull airflow mode on the other, meaning you just slide them onto the cooler and you are ready to go.
The A70 is a beefier design (and has a case of acne underneath – see above) and also has four 8mm heatpipes whereas the A50 is a three way design. The engineering quality as we would expect from Corsair branded products is exceptionally high and the heatpipes themselves are as good as anything we have seen from other companies, such as market leaders Noctua.
The A50 is the lower end model and Corsair have stated in their reviewers guide that this cooler is being marketed as a ‘great first stage upgrade' from a stock CPU cooler and that this product will ‘increase cooling performance and overclocking flexibility'. They then go on to say that the Air Series A50 should be compared to ‘stock CPU coolers' and ‘aftermarket CPU coolers that exist in a similar price bracket'.
There is unfortunately one major issue with Corsair's guide and that is the pricing – checking online stores in the UK such as Overclockers.co.uk – this cooler is retailing for around the £43 inc vat price point, which means its actually more expensive than the ThermalTake Frio, which is marketed as a high end overclocking specific unit. This has proven to be one of the best performing coolers in our testing so we remain slightly confused at Corsair's official stance on this.
The A70 is the flagship product in the Air Series range and it includes two fans which are already mounted onto plastic housings, these are effectively rubber mounted. We liked the fact that Corsair had one of the fans flow positions reversed so the end user wouldn't end up with two fans pulling or pushing air.
The Corsair reviewers guide is less restrictive on how we should test this cooler, which is just as well as the price in the UK currently is £55 inc vat which is putting it almost directly against such formidable competition as the Noctua NH D14 Austrian Sandwich which leads the way in KitGuru air cooling performance testing.
Both coolers are beautifully engineered and we particularly like the black and gold top surface design, it looks great if your case has a side window.
As previously stated, both of these coolers fully support all available platforms, including AMD AM2, AM3, Intel 775, 1156 and 1366.
