An Xtreme makeover with a Radeon 2900 XT & a VGA cooler

Product: Arctic Accelero Xtreme 2900
Info: www.arctic-cooling.com
Price: 30 EUR

Today we'll be peeking at a product that Arctic cooling is showing off at the CES in las Vegas as we speak, the all new Accelero Xtreme. It's their new flagship VGA coolers for both the Radeon HD 2900 & GeForce 8800 Ultra, GTX, GTS(G80). Two products are released:

• Accelero Xtreme 8800: nVIDIA GeForce 8800Ultra, GTX and GTS(G80)
• Accelero Xtreme 2900: ATI Radeon HD 2900XT, Pro

Now since I believe the GeForce 8800 series already has pretty adequate cooling at stock speeds, and since those of you who bought the power-hungry and rather hot Radeon 2900 XT got the temperature to match, I figured let's opt the Radeon version for testing. Our initial review already has shown that this card is getting ridiculously hot and not just that .. it's so darn noisy.

Some custom cooling can help you eliminate both of those problems, such as the Arctic Extreme series of coolers. I'm not kidding though when I say you'll probably be a little scared as when you first see this thing.  You'll say, "Wow .. it's the size of a whale."

Main Features:

• 3 x 80mm PWM Fans
• 5 Heatpipes Penetrate 107 Fins
• Optimized Air Flow
• Patented Fan Holder Eliminates the Humming Noise
• Low Noise Impellor
• Integrated Memory Cooling
• Voltage Regulators Cooling
• Pre-applied MX-2
• Crossfire / SLI Compatible

The Accelero Xtreme features with 5 heatpipes, 107 fins and 3 power managed fans. The design has been improved for optimized air flow design obviously to cool effectively, which according to Arctic is up to 240 Watt heat dissipation; that's quite a lot. They claim to can dramatically bring down the heat from GPU at least 20ºC lower than the stock cooler.

What we'll do over the next pages is a full test. First we'll take a look at the product and then dive into installation and obviously a stress test to see how well this VGA cooler actually behaves in several conditions.

But not before I scare you ... have a look. The cooler is indeed huge. In fact, it will block not two but three PCI(e) slots.