This is the best performing cooler I have owned. It's big, but that's why it's the best. It's simple physics: to dissipate heat you must have surface area. The Arctic Accelero Xtreme Plus II has lots of surface area.
I've got this bad-boy installed on an MSI R6950 Twin Frozr III PE/OC card. At idle, I have a temp of 42C with a silent 35% fan speed. While gaming at 1680x1050, temp stays less than 55C with the fan speed at 65%, which is audible, but still very quiet. Note that I run at 1680x1050 resolution, so your performance may vary.
At 100% the triple fans produce what I'd describe as an innocuous medium-pitch hum (not annoying to me at all) and a wooosh of air. Quieter than some stock case fans. But there's no need for me to run at 100% speed.
You may be asking...why would I replace the fancy Twin Frozr III that came on the card? Well, good performing and pretty cooler, but I wanted both the high quality build of this particular graphics card and the quietest air-cooler I could get. I am a stickler for quiet. At idle, my computer is barely audible from 2 feet away in a silent room.
Installation was easy, plastic stand-offs were perfect for my card. the mx-4 thermal paste that comes on the cooler performs great...no need to replace it. The G-1 thermal glue (for the RAM and VR heatsinks) is great...performs better than tape and can be removed.
The only caveats are
- The length of the cooler: installed on my 6950 card, from the slot-plate to the end of the cooler is 12.3 inches/31.3cm. And you need 3 slots height.
- (as mentioned in another review here) The fan shroud is about 2-3mm too close to the power connectors, so I removed (broke off) the locking clips from the connectors and they juuuust fit without modding the shroud or heatsink fins.
If you have the space and don't mind a little simple modding on the power connectors, you can't do any better than this cooler.
Excellent cooling, very poor installation fit. Be prepared to do some modding.
Installed it on my Sapphire Dirt 3 Edition HD6950 [...]There were two MAJOR problems. First, the plastic stand offs are too long, even the shortest 3mm ones. Glad I did a test fit because the copper bottom of the heatsink had at least a 1.5mm gap, not touching the GPU core at all! So I had to trim the stand offs a little to get it to fit correctly. So if you plan on using Artic Silver, you definitely need to check if it's touching the core or not, otherwise you can resort to using a thick TIM pad, but then what's the point of using an aftermarket cooler with such an inefficient heat transfer?Second, there is not enough space between the top of the heat sink fins to be able to fit the PCI-E power connectors. And if you use a "shorter" HD6950 board like mine, the plastic shroud of the Accelero completely blocks it as well, I hastily trimmed the plastic to get it to fit, and bent the heatsink fins with plier to allow the PCI-E power connectors to fit.That said, my HD6950 went from idling at 55C to now idling at 46C. In Furmark burn-in it tops out at 62C vs. 84C with the stock cooling.And the fans don't really spin any faster than idle. So it's really really quiet. I did crank the fans to 100% in Catalyst Control Center to see how loud it got. Certainly louder, but a much nicer lower octave sound, more like a 5.25" Optical drive spinning than the whiny hair drier-like sound of the fans in the stock one. And overall much quieter even at 100%.So for cooling performance, I give it 5 Stars.For installation and fit, I give it 1 Star.I average it to 2 Stars since it was such a pain to install it.
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