ARCTIC COOLING Accelero Twin Turbo Pro Review

👤by David Mitchelson Comments 📅21-03-10
Conclusion

ARCTIC COOLING have a solid name in the world of cooling and they continue by offering a good solution for the HD5870. I must admit it's quite a mixed bag, because the Furmark benchmarks put the Twin Turbo Pro in a rather dark place, with the thermal performance suffering quite significantly over the stock reference cooler but fire up a game and those temperatures are reversed and the Twin Turbo Pro comes out as the victor.

Heatsinks dropping off Accelero's is unfortunately something that is reported as quite common across the internet. I followed the instructions manual to the letter and still found myself with the same ill-fated occurrence. I ended up having to purchase some Akasa thermal tape to carry on with the investigation and although this was a superior method of sticking the heatsinks to the RAM/VRM the results were still poor. In the Furmark tests my VRM's were exceeding 105C during full load when connected to the molex connector at both 5V and 7V. It was only 12V mode that allowed the temperatures to remain under 100C and when you consider the stock reference cooler cools the VRM's at around 70C under load It's clear that in this particularly harsh bench test the stock reference cooler shames the ARCTIC COOLING offering.

With regards to noise, the AC Accelero Twin Turbo Pro does operate without any hindrances. At 5v, at 7v (see video below) the noise levels are hardly inaudible, with the 12v hooked up though sound levels obviously incease.

The thermal performance in Furmark does concern me. The HD5870 needs specialist, independent attention rather than being bundled with a list of other graphics cards which do not operate with the same power and aggressiveness as the 5800 series. It's a very demanding card and as a result needs some exclusive cooling. A good example of what I mean is with the range from Thermalright, isolated cooling for the VRM's: http://www.thermalright.com/new_a_page/product_page/product_vga_cooler.html and cooling for the GPU/RAM in seperate units.

I do hope that ARCTIC COOLING will take on board the crticisms I have highlighted in this review by addressing the bonding issue with their heatsinks.

After a purchase of around £25-30 and a gentle 30 minutes of labour you can have the Accelero Twin Turbo Pro installed and it does offer some significant improvement over the stock reference cooler in game.

Pros
+ Positive thermal performance in game
+ Fairly quick to install
+ Affordable
+ Extremely quiet

Cons
- Worryingly high temperatures in Furmark
- Bonding on heatsinks very poor
- Flimsy mounting system
- Poor instructions manual

[youtube]TPjapZC5jDk[/youtube]


We would like to thank ARCTIC COOLING for sending the Accelero Twin Turbo Pro. Discuss this review on our forums




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