Sama A60E CPU Cooler Review: Big Air, Small Price

Sama is just entering the value cooling market as other review sites have started touting an older brand’s similar move: That brand hasn’t contacted us yet, but the strategy we’ve seen from both could be a big threat to the market share of premium brands that we’ll include in our benchmark comparison. Let’s take a look at what we get:

Same Big Size, Lower Cost

Inside the box are a double-tower (two vertical radiator) heat sink with twin fans factory installed, warranty and installation guides, Intel mounting hardware and an Intel socket backplate, AMD mounting hardware, a tube of SAMA Freezee thermal paste, four plastic-covered metal standoffs, four knurled nuts with #2 Phillips drive notches on the tops, and a decorative fan motor cover that appears to be made of aluminum.

A smoothly machined copper base transfers heat from the CPU to the A60E’s heat pipes, where it’s carried away by pressed on aluminum fins. The lowest of these fins sits 47mm above that base, but the last 13mm at the end of each fin stack is cut to an even higher 56mm of clearance for memory modules. Fan clips can also be placed over different fins, lowering or raising the fans to extend that memory clearance.

Those fan clips make up the last 8mm of width mentioned in our charts on a sink assembly that measures 158mm high, 124mm wide and about 115mm deep without fans.

AMD users simply remove the clip brackets from their factory backplates and install the A60E’s standoffs in their place: The genius of Sama’s installation kit is that the holes of its Intel backplate have the same threads. Topping the standoffs with AMD or Intel adapter brackets and attaching the cooler’s four knurled nuts finishes this side of the installation.

Threaded studs that protrude from these brackets will be used for attaching the cooler.

Removing the center fan provides access to the captured nuts that secure the base of the A60E cooler to its AMD or Intel adapter brackets. After applying thermal paste atop our CPU’s heat spreader, we fit the cooler over our CPU and tightened these nuts in the position shown. The knurled nuts on the cooler’s base are spring loaded to maintain good CPU contact pressure regardless of which socket the cooler is attached.

We then plugged the front fan into our motherboard’s CPU fan header and the center fan into the front fan’s pass-through connector. Sliding the fan back into position and clipping it onto the rear sink completely our installation.

Here’s a snapshot of the system we used for today’s test.

System Configuration
Case	Thermaltake Ceres 500 TG ARGB
CPU	AMD Ryzen 9 7900X: 12 cores/ 24 threads, 64MB L3 Cache O/C to 5.00 GHz at 1.25 V Core
Motherboard	ASRock B650E PG Riptide WiFi, BIOS 1.18
RAM	Sabrent Rocket SB-DR5U-32GX2 64GB DDR5-4800
System Drive	HP SSD FX900 M.2 1TB NVMe SSD

A60E Performance Results

From a CPU temperature perspective, Sama’s A60E ties for first place against the Hyper 612 Apex from Cooler Master.

Motherboards have usually relied on CPU coolers to move air over their voltage regulators since the dawn of active CPU cooling, but the air that cools the motherboard can only be warm air from the cooler’s fins or waste air that blew around the fins. Though not the primary function of this cooler, the A60E’s drop to fifth place is still noteworthy.

Had the A60E tied the Hyper 612 Apex in noise production, it might have taken a performance award. Having tied for first in only one metric and lost in two others, price-to-performance becomes its only path towards such honor.

With its identical CPU temperature and lower noise, Hyper 612 Apex leads the A60E in cooling-to-noise score.

At today’s prices, though, the A60E’s value score overcomes even the low-cost A620 Pro SE.

Thus, even though it’s slightly noisy when compared to other huge/quiet coolers, and even though it merely tied for first in one of our two thermal metrics, the A60E’s low $35 price wins it a superior value award.

Sama A60E
Pros:	Cons:
Top-tier CPU cooling Low $35 Price Attractive aluminum cover plates	Noisier than pricier competitors
The Verdict:
A low $35 price at CPU temperatures that match our best $90 cooler make Sama’s A60E the best value CPU cooler of 2025.