Antec A50 - incredibly competent for $35

da na · March 22, 2022

This is a review for the Antec A50 CPU cooler since I was very impressed with its performance for the price.

I bought it ($35) for my workstation build, to cool an 8 core 16 thread 135 watt Xeon. For comparison the HP workstation I was upgrading from let the CPU stay in the high 80s and had incredibly loud, rattly, small fans while rendering.

A 1 hour Cinema 4D (same load as Cinebench) render saw the CPU get barely over 65 degrees on the hottest core with the Antec - and it's extremely quiet. Almost no audible difference between 500 RPM and 2000. I am using Kryonaut paste so that is helping quite a bit.

Design is quite good (I'm no expert but 4 heatpipes = good is true for sure, many aluminum fins, they are decently thick and spaced well enough). It comes with 2 brackets - one for LGA 2011, the big boy (what I bought it for) and one for any reasonably sized socket. I am not sure how it fits on others but 2011 it was extremely easy to mount - hard to get off though. And it comes with thermal paste if you need some.

Overall I'd say it's great for the price - Perhaps a midrange i5, i7, Ryzen 5, 9... maybe even some i9 or Ryzen 9 could reasonably be cooled by this. Oh and it's currently on sale for $30 on Amazon, $5 off.