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Both A50 and A70 are designed in the same fitting manner, so we will concentrate on mounting the larger A70 today. When we tried fitting the fan(s) to the cooler, we were immediately impressed with the new Corsair fitting regime – each fan is mounted inside a shroud which slides over the fins of the cooler and locks into place.
No messing around with annoying clips and it is great to see a company ditching such a lackluster concept and replacing it with this. We would actually expect other manufacturers to be stealing this idea in the near future.
Today we are concentrating on the Intel 1366 platform and the first stage of the fitting process is to slide the supplied bar under the main cooler section, between the core mount. This then fits into place within pre cut grooves.
A rear mounted backplate is utilised for the mounting, and its identical to every other fitting method we have seen. The main cooler then fits into place over the four bars poking through from the back of the motherboard.
Four screws are used to attach the mounting bracket to the bottom core area of the cooler. You could do this before mounting the cooler onto the motherboard, but for photographic reasons we did it this way for the review.
Once these are in place you then use four thumbscrews to lock the cooler onto the CPU via the backplate. You will need a screwdriver for these to make sure they are locked tight.
As seen above, the A70 is attached to an Asus Rampage Gene II motherboard. The A70 is quite similar in size to the Thermaltake Frio, and significantly smaller than the Noctua NH D14.
This means on most motherboards that you should be able to fit memory with oversized heatspreaders and even those with dedicated coolers.
The A70 however can pose a problem for some cases, we couldnt fit it into the Silverstone SST PS05 chassis we reviewed a while ago, and we were forced to remove a fan before we could get it into the case. This is worth pointing out if you are currently using a chassis with limited space. The smaller A50 obviously will fit into the same chassis without a problem.
