Arctic Cooling Accelero Twin Turbo Pro CPU Cooler

I've been looking for an aftermarket video card cooler for about a week and been reading reviews on various products. This cooler has been highly rated for sometime now but I was a little concerned with the adhesive properties on the thermal tape for VRAM. The concern was it doesn't stick very well and sometimes drops out during use and others had to resort to alternative methods to make them stick.

I bit the bullet and bought it anyway. To my surprise, I did not get any problems other have had. I did take a lot of time cleaning the card from the old paste with an eraser and taking my time cleaning the old thermal paste from the core. I own a Nvidia 8800GT and it took me around 30mins, start to end to fix the cooler and put it into the case. I did not have any problems with the thermal adhesive nor did I have any problems with misplacing heatsinks in the way of the heatpipes. Everything fitted like a dream.

To give you a quick idea how good this cooler is, I had my core temperature at 88 celcius with the stock cooler at full load. After installing the Accelero, my full load is 51 celcius at most (depending on ambient temperature at the time). The game in question is Starcraft2, max all settings and the card is a little overclocked. Also there was an improvement in VRAM temperature where with stock, around 55 celcius, now it's around 35 celcius. Another major plus is the sound, or lack of. At 100% fan speed, I don't hear anything. While the stock cooler, the fan sounded like the case was about to go airborne.

The only downside I have with the card is the size of the cooler. Having said that, I knew what I was getting into when I bought it, but I still had to ditch a harddrive to make way for it. Most people will say it takes up 2 PCI slots, but you'll have your next card down the 3rd PCI slot sitting very, very close to the fans.

The other thing isn't so much as a downside but something to note. The stock cooler took around 8-10 screws to secure the cooler to the PCB. The Acelero has 4 tiny screws to do this while keeping the main heatsink tight to the core. If you have a tower like myself, just remember the cooler is hanging off these 4 screws, screwed to the PCB, upside down.

At the end, though. The results overshadow all these small hiccups. Very happy with the cooler.

Replaced the stock cooler on my Asus 1GB Radeon HD 6850 DirectCU PCI-E 2 with the TTP and am over the moon with the results :-)

The stock cooler was far too noisy for me under moderate/heavy load.

I was so happy with the noise reduction and lower temperatures that I overclocked the Asus by 20%, yet still the TTP doesn't get too loud.

Fitting was straightforward but a tad fiddly (just like fitting most CPU coolers). If you buy this for the Asus 6850 some points/tips:

- You're meant to move the mounting plate from the center holes to holes A if the distance between the bottom of the card to the center of the GPU is more than 52.5mm. As that distance is 55mm on the Asus I decided not to move the mounting plate. No problems.

- The cable with the Molex, 12v, and 7v connectors isn't needed on the Asus 6850; you'll be plugging the 4 pin PWN connector directly to the GPUs board.

- You'll only need the long RAM heatsink and four of the small RAM heatsinks.

- I used the Catalyst Control Center for the overclock (AMD OverDrive section).

My temperature and fan speeds (from Catalyst Control Center using OCCT to load) are idle 38c fan speed 20% going to 70c with fan speed 33% at 100% load after 10mins. These temperatures are great and 33% fan is still pretty much inaudible from where I sit. The stock cooler would have been like a mini vacuum cleaner under this load.

Having had trouble replacing VGA coolers in the past I was a bit daunted by this monster.
It was therefore a joy to discover how easy it was to fit.
It is quite quiet and dropped the temps by 30 degrees, amazing for the price.