Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme Plus Review

Testing:

To test the graphics card heatsinks, I ran two batteries of tests: idle and load for the stock heat sink, Sapphire Vapor-X heat sink, Zalman VF3000A at minimum and maximum speeds, the ProlimaTech MK-13 heat sink without a fan, with a single low CFM fan, single high CFM 38mm wide fan, and dual low CFM fans and finally the Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme Plus. Both the stock and Vapor-X heat sinks were left on auto for one iteration and then set for 100% fan speed on another to get the best case scenario possible for those heatsinks. Furmark was used to get the load numbers after a 15-minute run, between runs a cool down was allowed to let temperatures settle back down. GPU-Z was used to monitor the temperatures.

Testing Setup:

• Processor: Intel Core i7 920 200x18 3.6Ghz
• Cooling: Noctua NH-U12P SE 1366
• Motherboard: ASUS P6T Deluxe OC Palm Edition
• Memory: Mushkin 996805 Redline PC312800 6-8-6-24 1600MHz
• Video Card(s): PowerColor HD 6870 PCS+ Call of Duty Edition
• Power Supply: Mushkin 1000 watt Joule Modular power supply
• Hard Drive: 1 x Seagate 1TB SATA
• Optical Drive: LG DVD-RW
• OS: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
• Case: Cooler Master HAF 932

Comparison Cooling:

• Stock AMD
• Sapphire Vapor X
• ProlimaTech MK-13
• Zalman VF-3000A

Even with the large size of the cooler, the Zalman offers lower idle temperatures than the Accelero Xtreme Plus. Now what really matters is how this cooler handles the thermal load when you are in the middle of a fierce gun battle on line. In this respect, the Arctic Cooling Accelero Extreme Plus delivers with the lowest GPU load temperatures of the comparison field at 41 degrees Celsius under load with the fan manually controlled and set to 100%. Having had a derivative of this cooler style from Arctic Cooling on several video cards I have tested in the past few months shows that the card manufacturers have seen the value that this cooler provides.