Arctic Cooling have been making enthusiast coolers for gpu’s and cpu for quite a while now. In fact one of the Driverheaven review systems has been using the freezer range of CPU coolers for a while now and we have been completely satisfied with the performance and even more impressed by the low noise they create. When building our media centre system noise was a consideration and with the AIW X800 cooler not being the best we replaced it with an Arctic Cooling Silencer 5 and this was a complete success though when we recently moved to the more advanced AIW X1800 series card we hit a brick wall as far as noise levels are concerned. You see the mounting holes on the X1k series of cards are completely different to those on the X8 series and you therefore can’t just use any cooler on your nice new shiny X1k product.

Luckily Arctic Cooling are on the ball and have recently launched a new line of GPU coolers – The “Accelero” series which features the X1 for Geforce cards and X2 for Radeon X1k cards.

The Accelero X2 Packing and Bundle

The X2 comes packaged in a reasonably sturdy but well designed pack. We say well designed because the clear plastic allows you to clearly see the cooler as well as read all of the important information about the product.

As you can see from the above image the cooler supports both the X1800 series and X1900 series of cards from ATI.

The rear of the packaging gives you a list of everything you are likely to need to know about the cooler such as the fan-speed and noise levels. A further useful statistic is that the thermal resistance of the X2 (when running at its stock speed) is comparable to the stock X1800 cooler at 5000rpm which is over twice as fast!

When you open the packaging you find the cooler itself, we’ll look at that in a minute, along with a set of instructions on how to install the unit.

The instructions are clearly laid out and easy to follow which is a plus, what we would have preferred however is to see some thermal paste within the bundle (Paste does come with the Arctic Cooling Silencer). Having a little tube of paste means you don’t need to worry about buying any if you need to remove the cooler for any reason or wish to install it on another card. The X2 comes with paste pre-applied though as a nice touch it is very well protected by a plastic cover from any damage which may occur in transit.

Finally also included in the package is a nice Arctic Cooling case sticker and a set of thermal pads to apply to your graphics memory.

The Accelero X2

Here is the Accelero in all its glory. It’s certainly a cooler that looks the part.

In the above shot you can clearly see the aluminium heatsink fins which connect to the unit’s heat pipes of which there are 6. These fins are almost completely covered by black plastic and the 60mm 2000rpm fan sits at the top of the unit blowing air over the fins.

The rear of the product shows that Arctic Cooling use a copper block to transfer the heat away from the GPU onto the heat pipes. Also shown in the above picture is the pre-applied thermal paste. You can see in the shot above that the back of the fan is sealed by rubber which reduces the noise created as no excess vibration leaves the fan. The wire coming out of the fan leads to the standard 3pin power connector which most Radeon’s use.

Above you can see the thickness of the cooler, it is of course a dual slot design.

Installation.

Installation of the Accelero X2 was very simple and really doesn’t require any instructions (though the ones you do get are clear and simple to understand). The basic idea is that you unscrew the stock cooler on your X1k card then remove the cooler. Next remove any thermal paste or pads from the card. The next step is to place the provided Arctic Cooling thermal pads on the memory chips. Following this then place the X2 onto the card and ensure the unit is lined up correctly. Finally screw the X2 to the card and ensure the fan power connector is plugged in.

Really, as long as you’re careful and take time there shouldn’t be any problems installing the X2.

Performance

To measure the performance of the X2 we installed ATItool and with the stock fan installed we measured the temperature of our AIW X1800XL at idle and load. Next we replaced the stock cooler with the X2 and performed the same tests. Here’s how the X2 performed.

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It’s fair to say there is quite a difference in performance between the Stock cooler used by ATI and the Arctic Cooling Accelero X2. With Load temps lower than the idle temps with the stock cooler you can’t really ask for more than that.

Conclusion

As you can see from the performance figures the Arctic Cooling Accelero X2 is one hell of a cooler. We had expected to see a reasonable improvement over the stock cooler however the performance we actually found was nothing short of amazing.

The performance of the cooler is made all the more impressive by how quiet it actually is. A stock X1800 cooler running at 2000rpm creates about 1.9sone this rises to 2.9 when the card is under heavy load and running at 5000rpm. As the X2 doesn’t vary its fan speed it runs at a set 2000rpm and creates only 0.4 sone, a quarter of an idle X1800! In fact there were a couple of times during the first few days of using the X2 that we had to check if our media centre was actually turned on…it’s that silent.

Our only concern with the X2 is the height of the cooler, this does restrict case compatibility somewhat and there is no chance you’re fitting the cooler into a Shuttle. We recommend that if you are thinking of purchasing the X2 you should check that you have approximately 1 inch of space between the top of your X1k card and the side/top of your case. Provided you have this space (and most cases will do) everything will be fine and can look forward to enjoying the exceptional performance and low noise that the Arctic Cooling Accelero X2 provides.

The Accelero X2 is available now for approx $30-40 or £20-25 depending on where you live.