Arctic Cooling Accelero Impressions

I thought I'd share some thoughts from our motherboard editor, Jake Brewer, on the Arctic Cooling Accelero with you guys today:

The Arctic Cooling Accelero series is Arctic Cooling’s latest product lineup. They have decided to let the aging design of the Silencer series go and start over from scratch with the Acceleros. The new design is more focused on quiet performance than the silencer series coolers and it shows when in action. So far there are only two Accelero’s available – the X1 for nVidia 6800/7800/7900 series cards and the X2 for ATI X1800/X1900 series cards (both for PCIe only). We decided to give the Accelero X1 a go with a BFG 7800 GT OC H20.

Installation of the Accelero X1 is very simple using the stock cooler mounting holes with the included screws. It took me a total 10 minutes to install this cooler from start to finish including removing the stock BFG H20 cooler. Removing reference coolers will take a bit more time and effort. The cooler comes with good looking dark grey colored thermal paste pre applied to the GPU area and 3M thermal pads for the memory chips. I decided to simply go with the pre applied thermal paste instead of Arctic Silver 5 after close examination. The 3M thermal pads were very easy to stick right on to each memory chip on the front of the nVidia 7800 GT video card. After all the screws were in and semi-tight I went back and tightened all the screws as tight as I could without stripping out the Phillips cross-hairs. The included screws are very small and require a good bit of down force to truly tighten like I wanted.

Upon running my main gaming system with this cooler installed I immediately noticed the lack of noise from the video card. My system isn’t exactly the quietest base for testing coolers of this type: It’s based on an Antec Super LANBOY with 2 Antec 120mm system fans and a Panaflo 92mm fan sitting on a Thermalright XP-90 CPU cooler (in the “suck” orientation) cooling a Athlon64 X2 3800+ @ OC’d to 2.4GHz. That said, the chipset fan of my nF4 Ultra-D can be heard over everything else when it spins up to full speed, the new VGA cooler is never noticeable.

Idle temps were recorded by the nVidia driver after ½ hr of sitting on the desktop idle, and load temps were recorded after 1 hr of looping the 3dmark 01 nature demo @ 1280x1024/32bit color and 2xAA.

Overall the temps impressed me quite a bit and I am convinced this cooler is very effective. I feel that my $30 bucks at Newegg were well spent.