Arctic Cooling Accelero Twin Turbo VGA Cooler Review

Introduction

Accelero Twin Turbo is a VGA cooler from Arctic Cooling compatible with a myriad of video cards, including Radeon HD 4850 and 4870 from ATI/AMD and GeForce 9800 GTX+ and GTX from NVIDIA. We tested this cooler with a Radeon HD 4870, a card that is famous for heating a lot. Let’s see if this cooler can really cool down this the hot VGA.

This cooler has two fluid dynamic bearing (made in Japan) 80 mm fans (up to 2,000 rpm each) responsible for cooling down a 30-fin aluminum heatsink, which is connected to the cooler’s copper base using four copper heat-pipes. The unit comes with pre-applied grey thermal paste (MX-2). According to the manufacturer this cooler can dissipate up to 120 W.

Figure 1: Arctic Cooling Accelero Twin Turbo VGA cooler, top view.

Figure 2: Arctic Cooling Accelero Twin Turbo VGA cooler, bottom view.

Figure 3: Arctic Cooling Accelero Twin Turbo VGA cooler, side view.

The power cable can be connected directly on the video card original fan socket or can be connected directly to the power supply, using an adapter that comes with the product. On the first case the speed of the fans will be controlled by the video card, while on the second the fans will be rotating at a constant speed, which you can select, as you can choose feeding the fans with +7 V (which is easily achieved by connecting one wire to the +12 V output and the other wire on the +5 V output) or with +12 V.

The cooler also comes with eight passive heatsinks for memory chips and four passive heatsinks for the transistors from the voltage regulator circuit.

Figure 4: Accessories.