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Corsair A70 High Performance CPU Dual 120mm Fan Air Cooler Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips

2010-06-24
today I'll be unboxing a brand new product from Corsair this is the Corsair cooling air series a 70 this is a high-performance CPU cooler and so just this isn't Corsairs first foray into cooling we had the age 50 before which I have previously unboxed on my channel so this was a high performance CPU cooler but this one is water so it's h4 probably hydro yes there and so this is a for air excellent air series so it's compatible with LGA 775 1156 1366 as well as AMD am2 and am-3 so pretty much any modern socket is going to be well supported by the a 70 let's have a look at what we've got on the side of the book so there's your dimensions fan speeds and it's in a bunch of different languages so you can go ahead and pause the frame if you happen to be whoo boy I don't know what language that is okay well moving on here's the back where they talk a little bit about the way that the H 50 CN air I was about to say the way that the a 70 handles fan speeds so dramatically up performance your CPU stock heatsink here they're showing the performance but not the hmm they're not showing the noise I guess that doesn't really matter because they already gave us the noise specs on the other side so for eight millimeter copper direct contact heat pipes so those are quite a bit bigger than the standard six mil once it uses aluminum fins as well as dual 120 millimeter fan so that's one of the advantages that the a 70 has over the it's a younger brother it's the fact that it includes dual 120 millimeter fans as well as one additional heat pipe so let's get the Box open here we're gonna go ahead and zoom that back out and start unwrapping this guy have a look at what we've got in the store for ourselves here now I mentioned the noise of the fans I mean it's not something I'm really concerned about because from the fan included with the age 50 to all the fans included with the 800 II case Corsair has done a good job of sourcing their fans and they tend to be quite quiet and move a decent amount of air so like I said yeah I really wouldn't worry about it too much so inside the we find two boxes I'm gonna go ahead and go with that small one first and I'm going to guess that that's what contains the heatsink I'm just kidding that's a terrible guess obviously this contains the accessories so let's see what we got for accessories inside the box here two fans that is all okay I like this so they come with kind of a shroud style clip that goes right onto the heatsink you can see you got four clips one two three four just like that another effect that the shroud has is that it keeps the fan slightly separated away from the cooler I guess in theory actually why don't I find out if that's true first but what a shroud would do if it did keep it separate from the cooler so it would reduce the dead spot in the middle because the fan blades spin like this so if they're blowing air through a heatsink they're obviously not blowing anywhere here but if you move it away then it can actually blow some of the air sort of this way because it just sort of randomly blows air out and the shroud also keeps it from escaping from the side so you're using all of the airflow from the fan to cool the heatsink ah okay so there were two boxes but one of them I actually picked the big one so this is the small box so this I'm going to guess contains the mounting hardware okay the first thing we find are Lou I like these these are great these are low speed power fan adapters rather I think they are okay yeah these look like inline resistors to slow down the fans if you should desire to do so and then this okay this is an adapter so you can run both fans off your CPU header as long as you have a half-decent motherboard made in the last 10 years or so your CPU fan header should be able to handle a couple low-power fans like this next we've got some a 70 thermal compound which I don't recognize the OEM for unfortunately sorry and then we have quite heavy though so it's probably a silver based one next we've got four thumb screws four rubber washers and then two of these rubber fan mount so as what they're normally for but I can't imagine that's to mention the fans in this case here is the multi adapter plate so this is for LGA 775 11 56 as well as 13 six you can see all three holes on there and this has got to be 4 a.m. 2 a.m. 3 yeah so that's where you're gonna get your mounting pressure from you clip it on the one side clip it on the other side it's not coming off here's a little coarser guide Y Corsair talks a little bit about some of their other products thank you for that corset and then we have back plate nice ok so you don't need a back plate on a.m. 2 a.m. 3 because AMD has graciously made that part of their spec that every a.m. to and AM free board has a back plate already so for Intel you will need a back plate and it does come with one that's adjustable although okay oh yeah it's simpler than I thought you just slide it it just has a little like it has a little piece right here that sort of fits into the little notches so that it only slides so far and yeah that was more straightforward than I thought it was very nice very nice Corsair very nice next inside this home we have the cooler itself finally so you know third time's a charm on guessing this is the cooler yes success okay here we will also find a QuickStart guide so this is going to show you how to install your cooler regardless of which socket you want to install it on that's probably too much thermal compound for the record I would use probably about half of that okay stop do not return this product to the store hey I like that working out a retailer it's always nice from the manufacturer takes charge of their own RMA service so what it means basically to us is that they have a lot of confidence in their own service that they feel that they can do an excellent job of taking care of a customer's concerns before it gets to the point where they have to return the product to the store so I guess it means that they feel they can probably resolve whatever issue they're having without coming to that so here's some do not eat don't eat it next we have the a70 itself so you can see the fins are quite tightly packed but that's going to be an advantage for a cooler like this because it does come with two fans so I'm gonna go ahead and see if I can figure out how their clip system works yet you can see there are little notches right here so that's going to be where the clips go I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna click one one on and then I'll show you the other side wow that was easy okay so it's that easy to install the the a 70 fan just like that okay so let's have a look at the cooler itself let's peel this off and we'll do the obligatory finger shot where we show the shininess although I can pretty much guarantee it's not going to be very shiny but it does appear to be quite flat so this is a heat pipe direct touch heatsink that means that rather than having a base clamped on top of the heat pipes and then having the heat pipes run through it the heat pipes make direct contact with the CPU heat spreader itself so the disadvantage is that it's much harder to manufacture this way and it does end up being more expensive and the advantage is that you have fewer transfer heat fewer places where the heat has to be transferred between different materials you're just going straight to the heat pipes which then transfer the heat to the fins and then it gets blown away to the air rather than to the base to the heat pipe to the fins and then away so you're removing one step from the process I think I didn't explain why dense fins are good for a cooler like this and it's because it does include two fans you've got lots and lots of static pressure regardless of well okay not regardless and the fans are using you've got lots of static pressure so you're gonna get lots of airflow through it even though the fins are stacked quite tight there that's what I was trying to say here are the four heat pipes it's very very obvious that these are thick heat pipes compared to some of the smaller ones that you typically see like here let me see if I can find something to compare it against really quick or maybe I have like a stock cooler in my bucket over here please tell me I got something I got some old knock - a heat sink oh yeah okay that'll do so here I think this is not - as original heat sink that they released like 100 million years ago so if I could just get this little lined up here then we could see that the heat pipes are much much bigger there you go so it's more expensive to manufacture cost more more materials and also transfers heat a lot better what else did I want to say oh by the way it looks like the shrouds do work to a certain extent they do separate the fan itself from the cooler but not by a whole lot so I wouldn't rely on it to reduce your dead zone by too much but with 120-millimeter fans it's also not that big of a deal I guess that pretty much covers everything I wanted to talk about you got your little aluminum brick here which you attach the mounting hardware to and now my cats picking it the packing materials cut that out you cut that out okay last thing yes I love this nice aesthetic on the top you got just a nice black plate I mean I like the the shiny chrome finishes as well but I also this is gonna look really sharp in a case like the 800 deep where the entire inside is black so now all you've got is a nice black finish top with just the copper from the heat pipe showing through I really like the look of this cooler and while it is quite on the expensive side I think it's gonna have the performance to back it up thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Corsair a 70 and that's my cat stealing the packing materials don't forget to subscribe to my Linus tech tips video blog as well as to my NCIX tech tips channel NCIX comm and thank you for watching
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