- Joined
- Jul 27, 2010
- Location
- Maryland
I just recently bought an Arctic Accelero Extreme Plus and would like to make a little review and share my experiences with this cooler. The reason I purchased this cooler was mainly because of the short falls of the reference cooler. The stock cooler was loud and hot. Even when playing videos it would get to 60c and idle temps were around 50c. That for me was just unacceptable.
Installation is fairly easy. All you need is to put of drop of the thermal glue on the memory chips and voltage regulators. Set the heatsinks and let them dry for at least an hour. After that it should be rock solid. The heatsink come pre applied with Arctic MX-4 and all you need to do is install 4 screws with the washers and the heatsink should be on really tight. For the 6970, the back plate won't be able to screw on because of the lack anything to screw to, so I just used 4 zipties on each corner of the back plate to hold it in place.
Now here come the results. The test system is in my signature and room temps were around 22c. The stock 6970 cooler I used had Prolimatech TIM on the GPU. My HAF X has a GPU air duct equipped with a 120mm fan blowing directly at the fan. And at the back of the card, the rear vent was cut through to allow maximum heat to exit the card.
The card is an unlocked 6950 running at 1.2v at 925mhz/1450mhz.
Here are the stock coolers results:
Here you can see how outrageous the idle temps are, especially considering all the steps I took to keep the temps as low as possible.
Here is me playing about 10 minutes of video and you'll see how the temps jump to 61c, just playing videos.
Now here is where it really counts, the LOAD tests. For this test I took the fan speed all the way up to 50% fan speed and ran Komustor for about 15 minutes. Now don't get me wrong, 73c isn't that hot, but at 50% fan speed, the 6970 sounds like a rocket taking off. Even playing with speakers turned up, it's unbearable.
Here is the more sane test. I used a custom fan profile that optimized lower sound but keeping temps within reason. Here the fan was around 42-45% which was much quieter but still very noticeably louder than my case fans. Here the temps jumped to 76-77c. You could lay off the fan speed more but then you'd be getting into around the 80's and I don't want that for my GPU.
Now let's see how the Arctic Accelero Extreme fared against the stock 6970 cooler.
At idle, the temps significantly drop to around 35c, that's a 15c drop.
Here is where this cooler shines, the load tests. At 100% load with an overvolted overclock, I achieved a load temp of 56c. That's an astonishing 20c difference, and unlike the 6970 stock cooler which was extremely loud and obnoxious, this cooler wasn't louder than my case fans.
At 100% fan speed this cooler is as about as loud as my 6970 at 30% fan speed. Temps even dropped to 50c for load which is just extremely astonishing.
So all in all this cooler kick some serious ***. It's inaudible in my case and drags water cooling to its knees. I paid about $70 total for the cooler AND VRM kit. The only cons of this cooler is the fact that it make an 11" graphics card 13", it dumps all the heat in the case making your CPU and Motherboard hotter, but with a really good case like the HAF-X, that shouldn't be a problem. Also it occupies 3 slots on your Motherboard. Remember it requires you to buy a separate VRM kit which comes in different flavors for every high end card on the market today. Go to Arctic Cooling's website for further compatibility info. I hope this review clears up a lot of things about this cooler because there has been a lot of negative things posted about this cooler. Many people forget to buy the VRM kit so they give this cooler a bad review. And some people don't like the VRM heatsinks they do include. I so far haven't had any problems and would definitely recommend it for any high end card on the market, like the 6970, 6950 or GTX 570, 580. This cooler is overkill for any card that isn't extremely high end. I've seen people buy this for the GTX 560 Ti and even GTX 460. If you want a midrange cooler get the Accelero Twin Turbo. With this cooler I hope I can squeeze about 1ghz out of my GPU so wish me luck
Installation is fairly easy. All you need is to put of drop of the thermal glue on the memory chips and voltage regulators. Set the heatsinks and let them dry for at least an hour. After that it should be rock solid. The heatsink come pre applied with Arctic MX-4 and all you need to do is install 4 screws with the washers and the heatsink should be on really tight. For the 6970, the back plate won't be able to screw on because of the lack anything to screw to, so I just used 4 zipties on each corner of the back plate to hold it in place.
Now here come the results. The test system is in my signature and room temps were around 22c. The stock 6970 cooler I used had Prolimatech TIM on the GPU. My HAF X has a GPU air duct equipped with a 120mm fan blowing directly at the fan. And at the back of the card, the rear vent was cut through to allow maximum heat to exit the card.
The card is an unlocked 6950 running at 1.2v at 925mhz/1450mhz.
Here are the stock coolers results:
Here you can see how outrageous the idle temps are, especially considering all the steps I took to keep the temps as low as possible.
Here is me playing about 10 minutes of video and you'll see how the temps jump to 61c, just playing videos.
Now here is where it really counts, the LOAD tests. For this test I took the fan speed all the way up to 50% fan speed and ran Komustor for about 15 minutes. Now don't get me wrong, 73c isn't that hot, but at 50% fan speed, the 6970 sounds like a rocket taking off. Even playing with speakers turned up, it's unbearable.
Here is the more sane test. I used a custom fan profile that optimized lower sound but keeping temps within reason. Here the fan was around 42-45% which was much quieter but still very noticeably louder than my case fans. Here the temps jumped to 76-77c. You could lay off the fan speed more but then you'd be getting into around the 80's and I don't want that for my GPU.
Now let's see how the Arctic Accelero Extreme fared against the stock 6970 cooler.
At idle, the temps significantly drop to around 35c, that's a 15c drop.
Here is where this cooler shines, the load tests. At 100% load with an overvolted overclock, I achieved a load temp of 56c. That's an astonishing 20c difference, and unlike the 6970 stock cooler which was extremely loud and obnoxious, this cooler wasn't louder than my case fans.
At 100% fan speed this cooler is as about as loud as my 6970 at 30% fan speed. Temps even dropped to 50c for load which is just extremely astonishing.
So all in all this cooler kick some serious ***. It's inaudible in my case and drags water cooling to its knees. I paid about $70 total for the cooler AND VRM kit. The only cons of this cooler is the fact that it make an 11" graphics card 13", it dumps all the heat in the case making your CPU and Motherboard hotter, but with a really good case like the HAF-X, that shouldn't be a problem. Also it occupies 3 slots on your Motherboard. Remember it requires you to buy a separate VRM kit which comes in different flavors for every high end card on the market today. Go to Arctic Cooling's website for further compatibility info. I hope this review clears up a lot of things about this cooler because there has been a lot of negative things posted about this cooler. Many people forget to buy the VRM kit so they give this cooler a bad review. And some people don't like the VRM heatsinks they do include. I so far haven't had any problems and would definitely recommend it for any high end card on the market, like the 6970, 6950 or GTX 570, 580. This cooler is overkill for any card that isn't extremely high end. I've seen people buy this for the GTX 560 Ti and even GTX 460. If you want a midrange cooler get the Accelero Twin Turbo. With this cooler I hope I can squeeze about 1ghz out of my GPU so wish me luck
