Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme 5870 Review

Installation

Regular readers will recall a couple of weeks ago I tested and installed a VGA cooler and needed two pages to explain it. The fact we have one here might give a clue to the simplicity of the task.

With the board cleaned up from the reference heatsink, a strip of thermal paste is applied to the VRMs.

The VRM heatsink itself needs to have three spacers placed over the screw holes, and these are self-adhesive which is another nice touch.

With the heatsink placed over the voltage regulation modules, three screws are then tightened and the VRM heatsink is in place.

It is worth noting that these three screws are 2.5mm rather than the 3mm screws that attach the main cooler, so you wont get them confused even if you tip all the screws out into one pile. Little things like that make a big difference.

The GDDR heatsinks are two single strips rather than a multitude of individual ones. These have a similar sticky thermal pad to that we saw on the VRMs above. Unlike the MK-13 we tested these are actually sticky enough to remain in place.

Once they are installed the main part of the Accelero Xtreme is placed onto the chip, the whole thing turned over and four 3mm screws used to keep it in place.

That's it. It couldn't be simpler. In fact removing the old cooler took longer than installing the new one including taking photographs as I went along.

As you can see, with it all installed it's a tri-slot solution.

The whole Accelero Xtreme is designed so well that the VRM heatsink and RAM heatsinks form a holistic part of the product, joining nicely with the main body of the cooler.

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With it all in place, it's time to see how well it cools and give it a score.