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Today i took delivery of a new cooler for my Leadtek 8800 GTX graphics card, so i thought i would write a little review on it, The stock cooler for the leadtek 8800gtx is the basic Nvidia reference design, while this should be adequate for cooling the card the card temp was shown as 72 C in Ntune's control panel this is a touch to hot for my liking but is actually in the safe working range of the card. Nvidias drivers should control the cards fan speed but they seem to fail to do so on the gtx under load, manually setting the speed to 100% permanently drops the temperatures down BUT the card then sounds like it has its own jet engine which is unbearable for general use, the search for a better cooling solution was on!!

Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme



After reading good things about the Artic Cooling Accelero Xtreme, (ill call this ACAX from now on) I though I would give it a try, Priced at £35.24 plus delivery from overclockers this cooler is slightly more expensive than the other cooler i considered, the Thermalright HR-03-PLUS (8800 GTX) VGA £28.19 plus delivery, the thermalright requires the addition of fans and these are not included so the price is would not be so different after all.

The package promises temperature drops of 20c and also a substantial noise level drop, I have to say I was rather dubious about the claims and didnt think they would prove to be accurate, testing is the only way to reveal if this is the case.

The ACAX features 3x80 mm fans running between 1500 and 2000 rpm they have an airflow of around 63 cfm the cooler istelf is a 5 heatpipe design with 107 cooling fins the package also contains small stick on cooling fins for the gfx cards voltage regulators and thermal pads for the memory chips

Overall build quality of the cooler is excellent everything is included and fitting requires only a screwdriver.

After fitting the cooler to the card it was time to fit it into the case, This is where the only real problem occured, this cooler is HUGE, the standard gtx cooler is a 2 slot design, the ACAX will take up 3 so be aware of this before you buy one, my motherboard (Gigabyte GA-X38-DS4) has SATA ports directly below where the third fan sits on the ACAX, these sata ports are now redundant because of the fan and i had to move my SATA drives to one of the other pairs of connectors near the bottom of the board. If you wanted to use these coolers with an SLI setup they would only just fit and airflow would be severely restricted.

Now to the test, after initial install I ran several games and also the unigine v.04 sanctuary demo for quite some time to get the card up to temperature once done i shut down the programs and let the machine idle for 5 minutes. On opening the ntune control panel to check the temperature I had a reading of 52 degrees, exactly 20 degrees below the standard cooler and exactly what was noted on the ACAX box this was achieved with the stock fan speed of 62%, running the sanctuary demo in windowed mode @ 1680x1050, the temperature increased to 68 c still below the idle temperature of the stock cooler still at 62% fan speed. noise levels are acceptable and well below the stock Leadtek cooler.

Verdict

Overall im perfectly happy with the results, the cooler performed exactly as stated by Artic Cooling,
I would give this a 10/10 but because of its huge size and the possible problems in physically fitting it into certain motherboard case combinations i have to give it a 9/10.

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Last edited on Wed May 28th, 2008 11:46 pm by -]K6[-SUT

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