Arctic Accelero Xtreme 7970 VGA Cooler Review

It is hard to visualise everything that we’ve shown and told you so far without seeing the Accelero Xtreme 7970 on the finished product. So here it is. First up is the backplate, as you can see it is slightly raised off the HD 7970 PCB due to the black square of EVA foam.

Here you can see the GPU contact plate mounted directly to the HD 7970 GPU. You can also get a glimpse of how all the VRM and RAM heat sinks fit quite closely underneath the main cooler. The half size RAM heat sink is used on the lower-most RAM chip so that it doesn’t interfere with the mounting system.

Here you can get a much better angle of all the other heat sinks in action. You can also see that “spare inch” to the left we mentioned earlier, which extends out to the right of the card and adds some extra length.

Its worth noting that all these RAM and VRAM heat sinks do provide passive as well as active cooling due to the fact the three 92mm PWM fans blow down onto the PCB of the HD 7970 and carry heat away from the main heat sink as well as all these smaller heat sinks.

Finally, here is the entire HD 7970 with the Accelero Xtreme 7970 cooler mounted. You can see the slightly “skewed to the right” nature of the cooler, although this has no effect on cooling whatsoever – just aesthetics. The position of the fan header on the HD 7970 makes getting the fan cable connected a bit tricky.