New Cooling Design

The cooler AMD included with the A170-7860K APU is all-new, made most obvious by the red fan perched up top. A look at the frame that holds the fan reveals this cooler to be by Cooler Master.


The fan is PWM-controlled, fitted with a 4-pin plug that mates with most motherboard CPU fan headers. This allows the fan to be dynamically controlled, based on the cooling needs as dictated by the motherboard. The main "meat" of the cooler consists of a set of evenly spaced fins that reach up from the cooler's base to re-direct airflow toward the VRM and memory sections of your system.


The cooler uses a normal latching mechanism to easily mount onto any FM2+ motherboard currently on the market without any additional hardware. There is a large solid metal base with pre-applied thermal paste to aid in the ease of installation.


There are two copper heatpipes that travel over the middle of the metal baseplate in opposing directions, which disperses the heat evenly throughout the fins. Those fins are shaped to accommodate the heatpipes, with shaped fins at the cooler's edges to more effectively transfer heat. AMD's new cooler is very obviously intelligently designed to meet its 95W rating.

If you set the fan to run at full tilt, you will hear some noise due to the amount of air being moved, but that noise is mostly caused by air rushing by the cooler's fins and onto the board's VRM and system memory, with the fan's motor emitting a small amount of it. Even then, it is not very loud, although definitely audible over the default fans I have installed into my Corsair Carbide Air 540, which is due to the fan's motor emitting a relatively high-pitched hum.

The cooler managed to keep my A10-7860K below 50°C at stock clocks, no matter what type of load I threw at it. I also noticed (using an IR thermometer) that the cooler remained pretty cool, with the board's VRMs being much hotter, about 27°C hotter, in fact.