Arctic Cooling Accelero S1 Rev2

     When thinking of buying a new heatsink the first thing that comes to mind isn't usually a new one for your video card but rather your processor. But of course there are quite a number of people who look for the performance edge wherever they can get it and an add on VGA cooler can be quite helpful in that respect. Today we have one to look at from Arctic Cooling, the Accelero S1 Revision 2 cooler with Turbo Module fans.    Here are the specs. Heat Sink: 138(L) x 215(W) x 33(H) mm Heat pipe: 6 mm x 4 Weight: 268 g Accessories: 2 Voltage Regulator Heat Spreaders 8 Memory Heat Sinks Warranty: 6 Years Application: ATI: Radeon HD 38xx series, 36xx series, 2600, 2400, X1950, X1900, X1800, X1650, X1600, X1550, X1300 series nVIDIA: GeForce 9600 GT, 8800GTS(G92), 8800GT, 8600, 8500, 8400, 7950GT, 7900, 7800, 7600, 7300, 6800, 6600 series (except 7X00 GS AGP) The card comes packaged in a rectangular box which is just the right size for a card this large, meaning not unnecessarily big. Rectangular in shape it features Call of Juarez on the box although we didn't see it in our bundle. Inside the card is packed nicely in Styrofoam with a fairly typical hardware bundle. DVI-to-VGA adapter, DVI-to-HDMI adapter, molex to PCI-Express power adapter, HDTV cable, and S-video cable. No extra software bundle is included. Arctic Cooing also included their Turbo Module coolers as well which fit easily into the Accelero. Here are the specs on the fan. Dual High Performance Fans Enhance Cooling Performance Extremely Quiet High Reliability Easy Installation Low Weight Long Lifetime 6 Years Warranty Installation takes a little time and patience but isn't extraordinarily hard. With our GeForce 9600 GT video card we began by removing all the screws on the back of the card. That is quite simple to do and afterwards the stock heatsink comes off quite easily. You'll then want to remove the backs of all the memory heatsink so they can affix themselves to the memory modules on the graphics cards. After that,  remove the sticky tag on the main GPU heatsink and put the spacers on the holes to screw into. There are both "A" and "B" holes depending on the graphics card you are using. Lining up these four holes with the GPU is a little bit tricky but once you have it lined up you can start screwing in the screws. If all you want is a passive heatsink at this point you are done.    We went further though and installed the Turbo Module coolers. This is a little bit harder and you'll need to use a flat head screwdriver to push open the aluminum fins to stick the fans into so it clips into the fan and remains steady. You'll hide the power cord in there as well so it doesn't get in the way of the fans. After this attached the power cord on the fans to one matching on your motherboard and you're ready to go.    Let's move onto testing.               Here is our current test system.   Mother Board  Asus Crosshair II Formula CPU AMD Phenom X4 9850 Black Edition Video Card XFX GeForce 9600 GT Memory Corsair XMS Dominator 2GB Hard Drive Western Digital Raptor Case Tsunami Thermaltake Display Samsung 20" LCD Westinghouse W4207 Our test OS was Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 with Nvidia's 175.12 of Forceware drivers and ATI Catalyst 8.4.   We'll start things off with the idle temperatures as measured from GPUZ. Degrees are measured in Celsius.   Stock Cooler Accelero S1 Rev 2 with Turbo Module fans 45 33 12 degrees Celsius is quite a drop and shows great potential for the Accelero S1 Rev 2. How much will this correspond to in overclocking though? We used 3DMark 2006 to test stability and RiverTuner to push the cards clock speed.     GPU Overclock Memory Overclock Stock Cooler 805MHz 1025MHz Accelero S1 Rev 2 with Turbo Module Fans 840MHz 1035MHz Here we see a gain of 35MHz over the stock cooler with the GPU speed and less with the memory at 10MHz. Not bad at all though on what already was a good cooler for the GeForce 9600 GT. Here is the GPUZ screen.         Conclusion: Overall we have to say we were quite impressed with Arctic Cooling's Accelero S1 Revision 2 with the Turbo Modules. The GeForce 9600 GT isn't a bad heatsink by any means but by expanding the size (although losing a few expansion slots) it is able to reduce temperatures dramatically and give a better overclock. If you are looking at switching up your VGA cooler then this is definitely one of the best performing ones we've seen so far and one to take a look at. The question of course is whether or not it is worth it. With the fans it is $38 at Newegg which for the price you could almost upgrade to the next level of graphics card so it is something to definitely consider. And if you're looking to keep your single slot cooler that as well would be missing. But if heat is a problem for your card or you're trying to push more MHz Arctic Cooling's solution is a good one. Score: 91%     '); //-->

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