Conclusive thoughts

With the introduction of the G92 based video cards it came somewhat as a surprise that Arctic Cooling is still aiming this product at an audience equipped with G80 GPU's, which is practically End-Of-Life now. There are still those looking for utterly high-end video card made by NVIDIA, and for those, the Accelero Xtreme 8800 might just be what they're looking for. This heatsink can also be found for ATI HD2900 series video cards, this makes the Accelero Xtreme heatsink somewhat applicable for nearly all high power video cards of 2007.

The Arctic Cooling AX8800 comes with 5 heatpipes who spread heat over a massive cooling area of more then 500 square centimeters, small heatsink design tweaks should boost the performance here and there resulting in a total heat resistance of only 14°C/W, that is far better then even most CPU heatsinks. Keeping in mind the triple 80mm fans positioned over the entire video card, it all makes sense why AC's brand new heatsink performed so well in our testing environment.

The standard cooling performance is far better then NVIDIA's reference heatsink, you can gain nearly 20°C on heavy load and AC's Accelero Xtreme even managed to perform equally to the Thermalright HR-03 equipped with a fast spinning 92mm fan and this with fan speed down to 60% …at 100% duty cycle the Accelero Xtreme managed to outperform the HR-03 Plus by a few degrees which makes it the best Geforce 8800 G80 / ATI HD2900 compatible heatsink on the market today.

But wait, there’s more, not only does it offer excellent performance, it remains dead silent too, at auto fan setting, the noise level was extremely low and even with the 3x80mm fans running at 100% they were not very obtrusive for a high end cooling solution.

Installation went smooth and can be done by less experienced pc users. One thing that should be highlighted is the fact that the heatsink is somewhat on the tall size. It will increase your 8800GTS card length up to that of the 8800GTX and knowing how some people had problems fitting their GTX's inside their pc cases you better look out before spending your hard earned cash money, we don't want you to run into the same situation... The height of this heatsink might also need your attention, the Accelero Xtreme will make your video card a triple slot solution and used in SLI you might have issue's fitting both video cards near each other, other problems could occur when using lot's of I/O PCI devices.

Price wise, the manufacturer suggested retail price (MSRP, excl. VAT!) for Accelero Xtreme 8800 is €32.90 (or US$ 47.90, not final). The HD2900 compatible version will be sold for roughly the same price. Unfortunately, the Accelero Xtreme is still not available yet on the market and we believe that AC is few months too late to really get us all enthusiastic about it. Those who haven't upgraded yet might find it a pretty good deal, the Accelero Xtreme is without a doubt the best G80/R600 compatible heatsink and offers a higher value performance ratio than the Thermalright HR-03 Plus...

Let's wrap it all up again:



+ marvelous cooling performance, best VGA G80 cooler around
+ Low noise at high performance
+ Adjustable fan speed via software
+ Easy install/uninstall
+ Extended longevity of the 80mm fans

- Only NVIDIA G80 and Radeon R600 series compatible
- Availability
- Triple slot
- Possible ATX Case compatibility problems due too large size

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We would like to thank Betsy and Patrick from Arctic Cooling for providing us their review sample and quick responses to our inquiries. That's it for today, until next time ;)