Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme 5870 Review
Installation
Published: 20th September 2010 | Source: Arctic Cooling | Price: £49.98 |
Installation
Regular readers will recall a couple of weeks ago I tested and installed a VGA cooler and needed two pages to explain it. The fact we have one here might give a clue to the simplicity of the task.
With the board cleaned up from the reference heatsink, a strip of thermal paste is applied to the VRMs.
The VRM heatsink itself needs to have three spacers placed over the screw holes, and these are self-adhesive which is another nice touch.
With the heatsink placed over the voltage regulation modules, three screws are then tightened and the VRM heatsink is in place.
It is worth noting that these three screws are 2.5mm rather than the 3mm screws that attach the main cooler, so you wont get them confused even if you tip all the screws out into one pile. Little things like that make a big difference.
The GDDR heatsinks are two single strips rather than a multitude of individual ones. These have a similar sticky thermal pad to that we saw on the VRMs above. Unlike the MK-13 we tested these are actually sticky enough to remain in place.
Once they are installed the main part of the Accelero Xtreme is placed onto the chip, the whole thing turned over and four 3mm screws used to keep it in place.
That's it. It couldn't be simpler. In fact removing the old cooler took longer than installing the new one including taking photographs as I went along.
As you can see, with it all installed it's a tri-slot solution.
The whole Accelero Xtreme is designed so well that the VRM heatsink and RAM heatsinks form a holistic part of the product, joining nicely with the main body of the cooler.
With it all in place, it's time to see how well it cools and give it a score.
Most Recent Comments
Finally.. Finally they have sorted out their stick down solution.
It's expensive but by crikey it's worth it. Excellent results as before, but before you had the constant 'crap your pants' feeling that the sinks were going to fall off.
Orsum !
(Ta for the review as ever
Excellent review.
that will go onto my wish list
And, as always, the review is great!
And, silenthill, I believe you are looking for this.
And its true what you say about crossfire, but again if you look at if for the average enthusiast (not extreme), tri and quad xfire/sli are much more expensive and cant be justified when on a budget.
my current build has a watercooled cpu - and i used to have a 4870x2 in the loop aswell. My gpu just stopped working and i didnt have enough cash to afford a replacement gpu and re plumb it back into the loop. Im also looking at AMD's bulldozer as a future cpu upgrade, and might end up selling my current pc, and rebuilding completely cooled by air.
Looks a dammed good solution and as mentioned justifying the water route becomes harder with these alternatives.
Would be nice to have a backplate solution for the exposed part of the card, usually fully visible in a windowed pc, just to keep it tidy.

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