Arctic Accelero Xtreme 2900 VGA cooler review - Page 3

The cooler is heatpipe based and actually has five heatpipes (look above). When you look closely at the the cooler you'll see copper pipes and aluminum cooling ribbons. An internal coolant is inside these pipes (air/gas/fluid) and flows from the chamber upwards towards the cooling ribbons where heat will be dissipated with the help of airflow. The cooling method is all based around circulation. Although we just named it gas the coolant can be something else or actually change into a gas. Usually it is liquid when cold but easily becomes a vapor when heated and vice versa. We're not sure what the coolant is used in the Xtreme though.

As heat is absorbed from the processor (GPU), it will follow the path of least resistance to the aluminum fins where the heat then dissipates

So the cooler is constructed with a copper base, which has the aluminum heatsink sitting on top of it, and at the base has 5 heat pipes connected to it. Connected to the heatpipes are thin aluminum fins. The main fins, the ones that are doing the real work, are only connected to the base by the heat pipes.

Right, let's get started shall we ?

Our guinea pig for today .. the Radeon 2900 XT. Let's tear it apart ! (gently)

We start at the backside where we remove the black backplate so we can access the screws that mount the VGA cooler.

Then we remove four screws from the GPU area .. and all the way in front above the DVI connector you'll see two more screws. Remove these as well.