You know ARCTIC is serious about cooling
because its name and even the website’s top-level domain scream it. We know
ARCTIC’s focus well because we’ve tested a number of its products, including
CPU and GPU coolers. The ARCTIC Accelero Hybrid is familiar territory for the
company; it replaces your graphics card’s factory heatsink and shroud. What’s
different, however, is that the Accelero Hybrid uses a closed-loop liquid
cooling system, similar to the closed-loop CPU coolers we’ve reviewed in the
past, to do it.
ARCTIC
Accelero Hybrid
The Accelero Hybrid consists of a plastic
shroud and fan designed to direct air over the VRAM and voltage regulation hardware.
ARCTIC also includes dedicated aluminum heatsinks you can affix to these
components with thermal adhesive, which is also included. The shroud has a
cylindrical socket that holds the integrated pump and cold plate in place over
the GPU. ARCTIC threw in a syringe of MX-4 thermal paste to aid in the heat transfer.
A pair of rubber tubes runs the liquid coolant to and from the heat exchanger,
and a 120mm PWM fan is charged with cooling the liquid before it returns to the
cold plate.
The Accelero Hybrid’s installation
instructions were fairly straightforward. In fact, the most difficult part of
the process is often just removing the stock cooler from your graphics card.
Because the Accelero Hybrid supports several of the last four generations of
AMD Radeon HD cards as well as most NVIDIA GeForce GTX cards from the last
three generations (see tinyurl.com/8p2fd6xfor a full list), there’s no explicit
directions for installing the heatsinks on your graphics card’s components.
Also, make sure you use the insulation strips to cover the circuits near any of
the heatsinks. Failure to do so could short out your card.
Needless to say, installing this kind of
aftermarket cooler will likely void the warranty on your graphics card, but the
cooling performance you get in exchange is worth it. We installed the Accelero
Hybrid on an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 and bolted the heat exchanger and fan to
the front panel of our case, above the HDD bay. This way, the heat exchanger’s
fan acted as an intake fan, which ARCTIC claims allows for the lowest CPU and
GPU temps. You can also install it on the rear panel, but make sure your CPU
cooler is working with your heat exchanger to keep air moving through your
case, which will keep your ambient case temps within acceptable ranges.
To test this unit, we got idle and load
temperatures from the GeForce GTX 580’s stock cooler, then swapped it for the
Accelero Hybrid and obtained temperatures under idle and load again. To stress
the card, we ran an instance of Unigine Heaven with tessellation set to
Extreme. The GeForce GTX 580’s cooler kept the GPU to 43 degrees Celsius (idle)
and 79 C (load). The Accelero Hybrid idled at an impressively cool 28 C and
peaked at 59 C. Noise output was extremely minimal under both load and idle.
If you’re a serious overclocker looking to
squeeze every last drop of performance out of your graphics card, the Accelero
Hybrid is a great cooling option.
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Information
Price: $179.90
Website: www.arctic.ac
Specs: Materials: Copper (cold plate),
aluminum (heat exchanger); Fans: 1 80mm on shroud (900 to 2,000rpm, PWM), 1
120mm on heat exchanger (400 to 1,350rpm, PWM); Airflow: 13.1cfm (shroud
fan), 74cfm (heat exchanger fan); Noise level: 0.3 Sone (shroud fan), 0.3
Sone (heat exchanger fan)
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