Accelero Twin Turbo by Artic Cooling – Review

Recently I had been having a problem. My graphics card (a humble PowerColor HD4850) was overheating to smithereens. Each time I wanted to play a game I would manually pump up the only small fan, increasing the noise tenfold, only to keep the temperature at a scorching 100ºC.

Yes, you read correctly. Under load (running Team Fortress 2) this card would easily reach the 100 degrees Celsius. The funny thing about it? It wouldn’t absolutely stutter at all!

After having done research on it, I came to the conclusion that this card was simply hot by nature. Or, better put, the stock cooler is not appropriate for the kind of heat this graphics card generates. There is being hot and there is not having appropriate cooling. This case is most certainly the latter.

My results, despite not having screenshots of it, were of:

– 80ºC idle (with the fan at 40% – which is the maximum I was willing to go noise-wise)

– 100ºC ++ load (with the fan at 80% and a deafening noise that even got my mom scared about it)

Now, while the card was most certainly designed with this sort of temperatures in mind, heat rarely does any good to electrical components. When we’re talking about temperatures enough to make your kettle whistle, then you know you should do something about it.

I did.

Today, I bought the Accelero Twin Turbo and at first I was a little reluctant. I was afraid it was just going to be more of the same as the stock cooler, with little improvement. I couldn’t have been more wrong. The installation is pretty straight-forward, although, to its own right, the RAM and voltage regulators heatsinks definitely could use more glue. With a little nudge I managed to remove one of the heatsinks so I am still wondering how they will hold up through time (literally).

This cooler packs quite a punch when compared to the stock cooler. It comes with two 80mm fans, attached to a massive aluminum block, which has a copper pipeline system that goes straight to the actual block that attaches to the GPU. Keep in mind that space may be an issue with this cooler; if you are going for CrossFire then think again about buying the Twin Turbo as your graphics card will use up THREE slots on the back of your computer case.

It is crazy, I know, but right now I have the same 40% setting on the fans (this cooler is pluggable to your graphics’ card fan power supply) and I get a cool 33ºC . While gaming, it never goes above the 36ºC and that is with the very same 40% !

As far as noise goes, it can’t even compare to the stock cooler, which is actually expectable. There is a trade-off between the size of a fan, the amount of air it can move per second and the noise in decibels it produces. Basically, with a bigger fan, you can move the same (or a bigger) amount of air with the same (or less) noise. These two fans are really silent, barely audible. If I push them to 100% then you actually start to hear them, but at 100% they are less audible than the single, stock fan, at 80%.

So if you still needed any proof that this is the cooler for you, look no further. This will solve ALL your temperature problems and I advocate that this graphics card should actually come with one of these coolers by default.