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Introduction

Artic cooling were renowned the world over for their range of GPU coolers that fitted the Nvidia 6 series and ATI 8 series GPUs. Their new generation of coolers is deisnged to bring solid cooling performance to the worlds most demanding video cards yet. Can the Accelero X2 sufficiently cool our in-house x1900XT? Lets see.

A little about Artic Cooling

ARCTIC COOLING is a private owned company founded in 2001 with headquarters in Switzerland, offices in Hong Kong and with production facilities in Asia. The team of ARCTIC COOLING insists o­n international young highly educated people with business, technical and communicational skills. The attitude to work is based o­n the Swiss innovative spirit and adheres to the high Swiss standard recognized internationally. This striving for excellence is integrated in all processes and is a matter of course. ARCTIC COOLING’s core competencies are multifarious such as systematic noise reduction, copper and aluminum heatsinks, customizing of thermal solutions, “Just-in-time?fan manufacturing, Ceramic Bearing, Multiple Signal Output / BIOS interface and low noise Fan Blade Design..

Features

Bits and Box

The packaging is desinged to reflect the image and style of the product; slick and professional. The front shows the name of the product, the manufacturer name and a very concise compatibility list.

The back of the packaging is slightly more in-depth, giving some more detailed specifications and features; there is even a couple of graphs on the cooler’s thermal performance.

With the Accellero you get a few bits and bobs though nothing that will get you too excited:

1: Screws & washers
2: Thermal ram sink pads
3: AC Sticker

The Accelero X2

The fan and top of the cooler are painted black with a large Artic Cooling sticker across it. The AC logo is very prominent, along with the name of the product (Shown with a large X2 on the right hand side).

The underside has a copper core that is covered in Artic Cooling’s own brand of heatpaste. The heatpaste is designed to be the perfect size to fill all the mircoscopic gullies in the base of the heatsink. Using AS5 anyway can sometimes yield temperature improvements, but usually in this kind of situation it is best to stick with what you’re given; though it can’t hurt to experiment.

The copper core is surrounded by a large surface area aluminium heatsink with a large set of aluminium fins:

Running through these fins are three copper heatpiptes. Heatpipes are hollowed pipes (Usually copper) that are either filled with a liquid with a high heat conductivity or a fine powder (Again, usually copper). Both these methods are far more effective than using solid copper or aluminium to transfer the heat therefore they are used to provide a pathway for the heat to travel from the core to the large surface area of the heatsink fins.

The fan supplied with the Accelero X2 is quite small compared to some of the larger coolers out there, but hopefully this will not hinder the performance of the cooler. One nice point to mention here is that the fan is backed and mounted on a small piece of rubber which helps reduce vibrations and hence reduces noise.

Installation

The first step in attatching a GPU cooler is to remove the old one and remove all original heatpaste and any RAM sinks and their pads.

Once this is done its usually best to add the RAM pads and sinks first (Especially in this case as the RAM sinks are part of the cooler and the pads would be impossible to attach once the cooler was in place).

After that its time to attatch the Accelero X2 itself.

Testing

To test the Artic Cooling Accelero X2 we left the GPU at idle for 30 minutes and took the temperature using ATI Tool’s diagnostic. We then ran Battlefield 2142 for 30 minutes to stress the x1900 and took the temperature; again using ATI Tool’s diaganostics.

Results

The GPU used to test this cooler was an Sapphire x1900XT 512mb and I used the supplied heatpaste.

	Idle	Load
Temeprature	39	47

These temperatures are hardly ground breaking but they are far and above what would be achieved at stock where the load temperature would sometimes creep into the low seventies.

Price

Price for this cooler varies quite widely from the low teens to mid twenties, though the average price was around £16 which is a fairly good price for a cooler of this performance.

Noise

The Accelero was very pleasantly quiet during the testing. This can probably be put down to the rubber backing of the fan taking away a lot of the excess noise.

Conclusion

The Accelero X2 is Artic Cooling’s latest generation GPU cooler and it performs in much the same way as the older generation of coolers that were designed for the Nvidia 6 series cards; just above average temperatures. The Accelero could really do with a better lapped base and perhaps an exhaust fan setup instead of the current. However, it performs almost silently and will give you better than stock cooling performance for small price that you are charged for this cooler. So if you are on the look out for a quiet, cheap solution to better than stock cooling, the Accelero may be for you, otherwise, a more performance conscious option may be in order.

Pros	Cons
Quiet	Cooling performance is nothing special
Fairly good cooling performance	Poor heatsink lapping
Quite eye catching

I’d like to thank our sponsors Artic Cooling for providing us with the cooler.

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