Introduction

The Achilles' heel of any high-end graphics card is always its cooling, or lack thereof. Past efforts at creating stock coolers for such cards were appalling at best. They were either very noisy, had very poor performance or worse, were both noisy and lousy at what they do!

Therefore, it was no surprise when many third-party cooler manufacturers like Zalman, Thermalright, and Arctic Cooling took advantage of that fact to release replacement coolers for graphics cards. Offering better performance and lower noise levels, these replacement coolers have proven to be very popular even though they officially void the warranty on the graphics card.

Of the many companies offering third-party graphics card coolers, Arctic Cooling has become one of the most popular choices among cooling enthusiasts, ever since they released their VGA Silencer series. The VGA Silencer coolers were originally meant for ATI cards only but soon enough, Arctic Cooling expanded it to support NVIDIA graphics cards as well.

Never resting on their laurels, Arctic Cooling has continued to make improvements on their coolers and recently came out with their brand new Accelero series of graphics card coolers. There are two Accelero models - the Accelero X1 for NVIDIA graphics cards and the Accelero X2 for ATI graphics cards.

But note that these coolers are not for just any NVIDIA or ATI graphics card. The Accelero X1, for example, is specifically designed for high-end NVIDIA graphics cards. In fact, it supports only cards from the GeForce 6800 and GeForce 7800 series!

As you know, the NVIDIA GeForce 6800 and GeForce 7800 series not only require a lot of power, they also produce a LOT of heat! Even NVIDIA's stock cooling solutions utilize copper heatsinks for better heat dissipation. How well will the new Arctic Cooling Accelero X1 be able to handle such hot cards? Let's find out!

The Package

Just like other Arctic Cooling products, the Accelero X1 uses the same plastic retail packaging. The transparent plastic box clearly shows design of the Accelero X1 cooler.

Front	Back

At the back, you can check out the cooler's technical specifications, albeit a very simple one listing only the specifications of the fan. The rear memory heatsinks can also be seen at the back.

While the packaging allows you to easily check out the cooler before you purchase it, it really doesn't do much to protect the cooler from direct trauma. So, if you intend to ship this cooler or have it shipped to you, be sure to have it packed in a box with buffer materials.

Contents

Inside, you will just find :

• One Arctic Cooling Accelero X1 graphics card cooler
• One instruction sheet
• One case sticker
• Six 8 mm screws
• Ten 6 mm screws
• Ten plastic washers
• Eight thermal pads
• One memory heatspreader