Arctic Accelero Xtreme 7970 VGA Cooler Review

The Arctic Accelero Xtreme 7970 has impressive cooling pedigree when compared to the reference HD 7970 cooler. It manages to achieve a 10 degree improvement in temperatures whilst remaining whisper quiet – noticeably quieter than the reference HD 7970 cooler. The mounting mechanism was quite straight forward, with exception to the double sided adhesive rings which are tricky to handle at best, but at the end of the day you normally need to mount your VGA cooler only once.

The price is what usually makes or breaks a product these days. At £53.64 (Price accurate at time of writing) the Accelero Xtreme 7970 from Arctic is well priced. There are currently very few alternative solutions on the market for AMD’s new HD 79XX series cards. If you consider the cheapest reference HD 7970 costs around the £350 mark, paying an extra £50 or so is a small price to pay to have peace and quiet, and some extra overclocking headroom. Very few other solutions on the market can match Arctic’s extensive VRM and VRAM heat sink offerings that make sure your VRM and VRAM stay cool as well as the GPU itself.

It is true in most cases that custom cooled graphics cards (Windforce, TwinFrozr, Direct CU II etc) would offer similar performance and probably cost less than the cost of a reference HD 7970 and an Arctic Accelero Xtreme 7970 together. Yet this product isn’t aimed at that, this product is targeted towards HD 7970 owners who want extra cooling performance and want less noise in their system but don’t want to have to buy a new graphics card to get that, and in that respect it duly delivers.

This product stays strong to Arctic’s tradition of high performance and low noise VGA coolers. With an attractive design and solid price tag there really aren’t many drawbacks to this product. The only real negative we could find, which is verging on “nitpicking”, is the fact the cooler adds extra size (both width and length ways) to the graphics card – although it is not enough to prevent you from running CrossFireX or fitting your HD 7970 into most mid tower cases.

With high performance, low noise, an attractive design, a good price, an excellent warranty and trademark Arctic build quality this product is more than deserving of our Editor’s Choice award.