Final Words & Conclusion
And here we are at the end of the article. The Arctic Accelero Hybrid 7970 Liquid Cooling kit does marvellous things in terms of cooling and noise levels. I was really impressed by the GPU temperature being below 50 Degrees C under full load, heck, close to 40 Degrees C even. Mind you that with liquid cooling there is always one caveat... your ambient temperature. If you live in a climate where it is is 19 Degrees C as it is where I live or if you live in a climate where 30 Degrees C is the norm then that ambient temperature is going to have an effect on the overall cooling temperature of the coolant. That said you'd still get excellent temps.
Noise levels then, not bad.. in fact you may consider the unit to be silent, I honestly had not expected that. It remains under 40 dBA and that's lower than an average PC which produces 41~42 dBA these days. So that's just really good.
What's not good you might wonder... well it's the installation and assembly of the product. It is a labyrinth of components you need to sift through. Installing the water block inside the shell is clumsy and not handy at all. Positioning and securing the cooling unit to the PCB with the help of the backplate seriously is a pain in the you-know-what. So you need to be very sure that this is something you want to pursue. If available, I'd honestly suggest you purchase the card with this cooler pre-installed. You'll spend a good hour or so getting all the components right and installed and even then... well it's just confusing.
One dislike, the VRM and memory heatsinks will need to be secured with a thermal adhesive... in normal wording that means you glue them to the ICs and that is something you need to be VERY aware of. You will not be able to remove the heasinks afterwards.
Remarks aside, we can only acknowledge that the Arctic Accelero Hybrid 7970 Liquid Cooling performs downright fantastically. If you feel it's worth the effort and the somewhat confusing installation of this product, then we do have to admit that the outcome is pretty terrific. Fantastic temps versus low noise is what this product is all about and sure, it works out really well. Currently you can spot these kits for roughly 120 EUR in the stores, not cheap but definitely something worth considering.
