Sama A60E Dual Tower Heatsink Review

The great thing about CPU aircooling is how affordable it is with initial purchase and throughout the lifespan of the PC.  Coolers like the Sama A60E are easy to install and require very little maintenance aside from an occasional dusting to clean the fans and heatsink fins.

The Sama A60E features a six heatpipe design that is split across dual cooling towers.  To help improve cooling you will get two 120mm fluid bearing fans that move around 78CFM at full speed with a noise level of 29dBA.  With the fans free running away from the heatsink they are rather quiet however, during the overclocking tests they would run full speed and were extremely loud.  I attribute this to turbulence between the fan and radiator that was then compounded by the arraignment of the cooling towers.

Installation was extremely easy and followed a process that many hardware enthusiasts are familiar with.  Install the backplate, build the base, install the mounting rails and use two screws to secure the heatsink.  Installing the fans was a different matter and for this I encountered three rather annoying issues.  First, the extremely short fan tails necessitated that I connect them before installing the fans.  This wouldn’t have been issue had the wires used to secure the fans actually stayed attached to the fans.  I would seem that due to how the fans were designed the metal wires would easily fall out making it rather difficult to balance everything.  The third issue was that the fan attachment wires kept falling out of the fan and would get caught on the radiator causing the entire process to stop.

I was able to squeeze the clips together and get a little more friction but, really the wires were designed for a different fan type making the process more difficult than it should be.

For those looking at a dual tower cooler, there is a secret performance menu to explore when testing your cooler.  This involves removing the outer cooling fan and only running the one between the two towers.  There is a slight impact to overall cooling performance but, you will get a massive reduction in overall noise across the entire operating range.

Overall, the Sama A60E is a pretty basic heatsink that has been refined to be very stylish cooler.  You will find an interesting pattern along the edges of the heatsink towers designed to increase performance and given our thermal tests, the entire package works rather well.  I did notice that the fans are quite loud and the installation procedure favors builds with low profile and non RGB memory as the fans tend to obscure the modules completely.  This cooler does not have any ARGB/RGB support and to be honest, I’m rather glad. However, it is not outside the realm of possibility for the user to swap out the Sama fans for an RGB flavor of their choice, not only will you get fancy lights but might also fix the noise issue in the process.

Excellent Performance
Six Heatpipe Solution
Compact 120mm Design
Easy Installation
Cut-outs to Clear Tall Memory
High Flow Fans

Fan clips don’t work well with the included fans
Cooler is quite loud under full load