Review on Corsair A500 CPU Cooler with High Performance Dual Fans by Scott Wallace

So if you're not used to large coolers and your case can't handle them, then this probably isn't for you. This is my 12th build of the computer and second build in my Corsair 900 Obsidian series case (although I'd probably upgrade to a 680 or so after this build, the 900 has some major issues that I wasn't aware of on the last build were ). Compared to noctua d15 there are some things that make it better (width), but overall I prefer Noctua. The biggest downside to the whole design is that the heat pipes are the interface for the die-cap heatsink. They are not known to be flat. I didn't know what to believe but I didn't want to fry my CPU so I lapped the surface with 800-7000 grit one by one and the boy was shocked at how uneven this interface is. Look at the pictures if it was flat it would be copper. However, after doing this and landing at pk-3, my 3950 39-45 idles before booting up, which pretty much matches my 1800 running Noctua. Very happy with this product but I'm deducting a star because it's not fire and forget, plug and play or whatever you want to call it. I think it will be a pretty good product for advanced users. Other thoughts, the width of this one is a few mm smaller than the Noctua, which forced me to use it with an Asus board as the placement of the processor is pretty close to the first pciex16 slot. Remember, if you're building and want a Boss cooler on your CPU, you may need to move your GPU to a second slot. Usually this isn't such a big deal anymore as high end boards come with a few PCIe16 chips and I hope nobody uses Crossfire anymore (since it's inefficient). I had to use the first slot because I wanted to use a heatsink on my NVMe drive. It's not a deal breaker, but still something to plan for.