Introduction

Arctic Cooling is known for their ultra low noise cooling equipment. The company produces both low noise fans and heat sinks and that makes them unique. Because they control every step of the manufacturing process required to make a cooler, they can ensure that some of their coolers are made without design compromises.

The cooler I will be taking a look at today is the newest in their quite successful line of graphics card coolers. It is dubbed the Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme 8800. The Xtreme is available in two versions: one for NVIDIA's 8800-series cards as the name suggests and another version tailored to meet the specifications of the 2900-series cards from ATI. Both are designed in the same manner using a lot of aluminum fins and three 80 mm PWM controlled fans. The cooler is made using a compact high performance design that is SLI compatible.

Specifications

• 3 x 80mm PWM Fans
• 5 heat pipes penetrate 107 Fins
• Optimized air flow
• Patented fan holder eliminates humming noise
• Low noise impeller
• Integrated memory cooling
• Voltage regulator cooling
• Pre-applied MX-2
• SLI compatible
• 6 year warranty

The Package

The Xtreme ships in a no nonsense package. Black and very informative about what you can expect of the product. With the cooler you get what is needed to install it and a small Arctic Cooling sticker. The design of the heatsink is quite interesting, using three PWM controlled 80 mm fans to cool down a huge array of aluminum fins. All of the fans are hooked up to the onboard fan controller of the 8800 Series cards, which is nice. That very feature allows you to specify the fan speed through a program like RivaTuner for each of the three performance profiles stored on the card.

This cooler is designed in a different way than most competitor's products. The heat sink is made so that it covers all the hot parts on the card except the voltage regulators, these are covered with small aluminum heat sinks supplied with the cooler. The block that covers the GPU is made of copper whereas the part of the base that covers the RAM is made of aluminum. This should help to keep weight at a minimum while still maintaining good cooling performance. Besides that the installation of the cooler should be extremely easy because you do not have to apply lots of small heat sinks to the RAM nor the I/O chip.


The small voltage regulator heatsinks come pre-applied with some adhesive thermal pads. They are a bit smaller and less sophisticated than other voltage regulator heat sinks. This of course does not matter when you have an 80 mm fan hovering just above the that area creating a lot of airflow around the components.