Arctic Cooling Accelero Hybrid VGA Cooler Review: Not For the Faint of Heart
by Dustin Sklavos on December 28, 2012 8:15 PM EST- Posted in
- Arctic Cooling
- graphics
- cooling
Performance Results
Of course, for the Arctic Cooling Accelero Hybrid, the proof is in the testing. Once I was satisfied that I hadn't bricked the GeForce GTX 680 during assembly, I went about testing it in eVGA's OC Scanner X software. I've actually been pretty happy with OC Scanner X in personal use, and it generates enough heat to give the coolers a good workout.
I will say that what I found in testing, while not necessarily unexpected, was still pretty impressive.
Ambient temperature during testing was ~21C.
Unsurprisingly, idle temperatures are pretty impressively low for both cooling systems, but already the Accelero Hybrid is able to produce a substantially better result well outside of the margin of error.
Once a load is applied to the card, though, all bets are off. The Accelero Hybrid blows past the reference cooler, producing a massive reduction in thermals. Keep this in mind, I'm going to come back to it later.
Since the reference cooler and Accelero Hybrid both idle below the 30dB floor of our sound meter, idle noise results aren't listed. What's impressive is that the Hybrid is almost dead silent under load, regardless of the increased pressure applied to the cooling system. So while the reference cooler gets louder the harder you push the card, the Hybrid seems to have plenty of thermal headroom to spare.
Using the Arctic Cooling Accelero Hybrid on the GTX 680 has also revealed another interesting wrinkle. While overclocking on the GTX 680 is mostly limited by the Power Target, the reference cooler definitely introduces some thermal limitations. I've seen the GPU clock of the 680 take a step back and begin to throttle a little once it goes north of 70C, but because the Accelero Hybrid has so much thermal headroom, that throttling almost never happens. With the fan control manually maxed out at 85%, I registered a noise level of just 31.3dB in testing, but have actually been able to push the 680 north of 1.3GHz. The stable 6.6GHz clock on the GDDR5 has been consistent between the reference cooler and the Hybrid, but the added headroom for the GPU has allowed me to move past the ~1.2GHz I was able to attain on the stock cooling.
As I've been writing this review, I've actually been steadily testing overclocking on the GTX 680 plus Hybrid by incrementing the GPU Offset +10MHz, running it through OC Scanner X for fifteen minutes (and accepting no artifacts), then benchmarking it in 3DMark 11's Extreme test. This is by no means a thorough stability test, but it's a decent way to poke around the edges of the card's tolerances. I can't imagine how much hotter and louder it would be running with the reference cooler, but with the Hybrid at 85% it's peaking at 63C. That's at 1.3GHz, sustained load.
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halo37253 - Saturday, December 29, 2012 - link
Yeah right, No one wants a big HSF in their PC. CLC's don't leak, if your one of the vary few I feel bad for ya. Compared to HSF CLCs are quiet and take up vary little space. They tend to Overclock just as good as the best HSFs as well. I personally would just get a rasa kit for cheap if I was going to get into water cooling, as water cooling is dead easy to do try it and you'll see for your self.For overclocking a GPU nothing can touch water cooling, I have my GTX470's under water and they scream. Though under air even at only 800mhz they would get into the 90-104c while gaming. Water is just the way to go if you want a quiet PC while pushing the overclocks on everything in your system. I'm done hearing fan noise, and sadly Air cooling isn't able to keep noise down while overclocking so...
randomly - Sunday, December 30, 2012 - link
I've watercooled a lot of PC's in my day and the substantial advantages in noise and cooling that water cooling once had have eroded a great deal. Modern high end heat pipe heatsinks do very well and the hassles and headaches of water cooling and the minimal improvements are just not worth the trouble of water cooling anymore. Any flexible tubing is going to slowly lose coolant because plastics and rubbers are porous, even if you don't have a catastrophic leak you still have the maintenance problems. Leaking pumps, failing pumps, leaking connections, leaking resevoirs, system running out of coolant through porosity losses in tubing, dead gpu cards while installing waterblocks etc. I've seen it all. After a dozen years with water cooling I can't see myself going back to it with the current air cooling options.Last upgrade I just used a Silverstone HE01 Heligon heatsink for the cpu, and an ASUS GTX680 triple slot vid card. The whole system is quieter than the previous water cooled setup, with no hassles, no leaks to worry about and no risk in killing my gpu installing a water cooling setup (done that before too). Everything is overclocked, the i7-3570k at 4300mhz, the GTX680 at 1230mhz and the system is barely audible even with heavy gaming. You might get a slight bump in overclocking potential with water cooling, but it'll be so small you won't be able to notice a difference is the machine.
Kidster3001 - Thursday, January 3, 2013 - link
Agreed. My first water cooling setup was in 2004 on Prescott. It needed it though :-) Bought everything from Dangerden.com and spent well over $500 for everything.I kept that case and setup alive for several years. The CPU, Northbridge and GPU were all cooled by it through a few rebuilds. When I upgraded to Conroe X6800 I moved to a new case and went back to air cooling. Other than the first month or so playing with a new rig, pushing OC to the limits, the water cooling wasn't really needed for 24x7 operation at high component speeds and low fan noise.
Once in a while I miss being able to run at 5+ GHz when I want to but it's not worth my time or the cost just for a few days a year of fun.
Flunk - Friday, December 28, 2012 - link
It seems like most users would be better served by one of Arctic's air coolers like the Extreme series or Twin Turbo 2 (I have 2 of these in my system). They're a lot cheaper, provide more than adequate cooling for huge GPU overclocks and if someone is hardcore enough to want more then custom watercooling makes a lot more sense.kmmatney - Saturday, December 29, 2012 - link
I'm wondering if the ability to overclock higher was mainly due to better VRM cooling, which is air cooled in the review.My experience with Arctic's air coolers has been great. I had a HD4890 that was unbearably loud with the stock cooler. Using an AC Accelero Rev 2 made it virtually silent (just a 5V quiet fan on the heatsink), cooler, and allowed me to overclock higher. For me, the key was keeping the VRMs cool, and I ended up buying a $10 Zalman VRM cooler which made all the difference. So I'm not sure the GPU cooling was waht allowed the card to overclock higher - I think it may be the better VRM cooling.
Dustin Sklavos - Saturday, December 29, 2012 - link
The thought had occurred to me as well, but either way, the GTX 680 was able to get a bit more headroom.JlHADJOE - Sunday, December 30, 2012 - link
I'm guessing a combination of both.The GK104s throttle down their clocks after hitting certain thermal thresholds, the first of which is at 70C. So even with VRM cooling in place, if thecard hits 70C then it wouldn't have clocked as high as it did with the liquid cooler.
londiste - Sunday, December 30, 2012 - link
there is a very simple difference between hybrid and extreme/twinturbo coolers. with hybrid it is very simple to get the heat out of the case (even compared to reference cooler), with extreme/twinturbo... not so much.not everyone is boasting a case with 5+ to keep the air moving quickly in and out at all times.
scaramoosh - Friday, December 28, 2012 - link
It looks stupid and with an SLI system you're gonna be struggling.These companies need to make an all in one modable system for noobs who don't want to invest time in to learning what parts they need to buy. I think that is the main problem to why people don't invest in water cooling, like where do you start? They buy this stuff just because it is easy.
CK804 - Saturday, December 29, 2012 - link
www.koolance.com