Introduction



Arctic Cooling has been around for quite some time now and gaining more recognition world wide. The reason why AC is having success with their products is because they are geared towards silence and performance, while keeping the price very competitive. The Accelero series is a range of AC heatsinks aimed for the VGA market, their latest product recently landed on my doorstep and although that it is still a pre-release sample, AC is just few weeks away from making this product available for everyone. Here is a quick shot of what you'll be looking for once it hit the streets:


Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme

The Accelero Xtreme can be found in two different tastes, depending on what video card you own, Accelero Xtreme 8800 which support G80 based NVIDIA (8800GTS 320MB/640MB, 8800GTX, 8800 Ultra), or you might be in search for the Accelero Xtreme 2900 which -obviously- supports ATI HD2900 Pro and XT video cards.

Madshrimps has tested already few Geforce 8800GTS (G80) compatible video cards coolers, visiting google-pictures made us very curious to find out how Xtreme 8800 would stack up against the best we have available at this moment. In a series of repeated benchmark we tried to get representable results, here is a list of the products we will be comparing:

Stock NVIDIA 8800GTS heatsink

Thermalright HR-03 Plus with custom fan

MACS M-Sorceress II MA-8280-2

Zalman VF1000 LED

Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme 8800

Our test setup consists out of the following components:

Test setup

Geoffreys' Test Setup
CPU	Intel E6600 @ 3GHz
Cooling	Zalman 9700 LED
Mainbord	Abit Fatal1ty FP-IN9 SLI
Memory	2x1Gb TEAMGROUP Xtreem 800MHz 4-4-4-10-35-4-10-10-10-2T
Graphics	Sparkle 8800GTS 320MB
Other	FSP Epsilon 900 PSU Maxtor 80Gb PATA HDD Seagate 200GB SATA HDD Antec Nine Hundred housing 20" Dell UltraSharp 2007FP TFT monitor

The Intel E6600 was being overclocked to 3GHz by changing the FSB from 266MHz to 333MHz and by keeping the multiplier at default (9). This way the CPU would score on par with the Intel E6850 based on the popular G0 stepping.

Teamgroup's pair of 1Gb DDR2 sticks were clocked to default settings via the NVIDIA 650i chipset.

ForceWare 163.44 drivers

While Windows Vista is now officially launched, we decided to test with a mature Windows OS (XP SP2), even if we wanted to, the lack of decent working NVIDIA drivers for Vista keeps us from testing on the new platform.

Benchmark methodology

The tests/benchmarks were completed with the Geforce 8800GTS at stock speeds and stock voltage levels. In order to obtain decent and reliable results we loaded the 8800GTS for exact 30 minutes and logged the maximum GPU core temperature using Rivatuner. System 'IDLE' temperatures were obtained by letting the system stand untouched for another 30 minutes. We also logged the test-room air temperature and recalculated the GPU temperature by adding/subtracting the differential air temperature. This means that we can now make a clear chart which does not only represent how good/bad a product can perform ("product A is x times better then product B"), but also shows you where our results are placed in real-life environments ("product A & B performed good/average/bad with our test setup, temperatures were...")

Let's move on to our today’s product ->