Introduction

With three GTX 470s folding all the time, or at least when I'm not gaming, the heat that gets dumped into the room with stock coolers can be unbearable to say the least. Not only do they allow for rather high temperatures, there isn't a set of headphones that I own that can drown out the sound of the fans at anything over 80% speed. Along the way I ended up with water cooling two of the 470s and the third sat across the room on the stock cooler awaiting a replacement to improve on both the heat level and sound levels.

Along came Arctic Cooling and the offer to review something new in VGA cooling. The concept of this cooler has seen evolutions from the 2900 series when it was three small fans and only three heatpipes; AC moved onto a four pipe version to take a bit more heat load. After that they came out with a five pipe version that used a pre-cooler with the cooler made for the GTX 2xx series, and with slight changes and modifications they developed what we are going to see here in just a couple of pages.

If you haven't guessed by now, this sample is from the XTREME series of Accelero coolers. This time around we are going to look at a 250W cooler from Arctic Cooling that is designed for the 5xxx series and Fermi cards. Today we are going to take a look at the Accelero XTREME Plus with the additional VR003 installation kit. With an interchangeable mounting plate and specific kits, the Plus offers some of the widest compatibility on the market for a cooler that you will soon see can more than handle its business.