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Video Card Cooling
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Wednesday, 12 July 2006 |
| With the ever increasing power and size of todays modern video cards cooling is becoming an issue for both the manufacturer and the end user, but for different reasons. | | | | | | Introduction |
| | | Video card cooling much like processor cooling is becoming an increasing problem.
The end user is forced to deal with abnormally large video ccards and an insane amount of noise. The latter problem is one I was faced with recently upon my purchase of a X1900XT that sounded like a plane was taking off anytime it came under load.
Today, we bring Arctic Cooling's cooling solution for the X1900 series video cards to the table, the Accelero X2, to see if it can both cool the card under heavy loads sufficiently while keeping the noise levels at a minimum. | | | |
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| | | Product Details & Specifications |
| | | Product Name: "Accelero X2 "
Product Manufacturer: Arctic Cooling (Arctic Cooling Homepage)
Manufacturers Description: Not Available
Dimensions: 152(L) x 120(W) x 30(H)mm
Weight: 260G
Noise Level: 0.4 Sone (It's just.. quiet, vewy vewy quiet..) | | | |
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| | | | | Lab Test System Specifications |
| | | CPU: Intel Pentium D 920 2.8Ghz
Motherboard: ASUS P5WD2 Premium
Memory: 2GB Corsair XMS2-Pro DDR2-5400
Video Card: ATI Radeon X1900XT
Power Supply: Seasonic 500W | | |
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| | | | | Initial Testing & Results |
| | | For our first test, we have not overclocked any internal components of the system. We did receive some strange readings however from our X1900XT, giving us readings of 21°c, which was below ambient and I checked and double checked and certainly did not see any phase changing technology attached!
We got the issue resolved quickly however and temperatures were back up to the norm. For verfication reasons, we also used an additional temperature sensor for all our tests.
Below are the results of our intial tests, with everything stock.
As you can see clearly from the results, the Accelero X2 is an excellent cooler, it's provided a far more than adequate cooling solution for the X1900XT. Load temperatures from load differ almost 20°c! | | | | | |
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| | Overclocking Results |
| | | Unlike our Intel D920 that we have here in the lab, our X1900XT has never yielded great overclocking results, infact going a mere 30mhz over on the core provided serious artifacts and freezing. For this reason we were unable to provide overclocking results for the Accelero X2. | | | | | |
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| | | The Conclusion |
| | | Having lived with the stock cooling on the X1900XT for quite sometime, I was relieved when we were given the opportunity to review this product.
The noise issue often associated with the high end video card cooling solutions is now over, this thing is quiet! So much so that after the initial installation and upon the first boot I had to check to make sure it was even on, fortunately it was.
Given the excellent cooling performance, low noise, low price and easy installation, the Accelero X2 from Acrtic Cooling is the first product to recieve the Overclockers Canada Must Have Hardware Award.
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