Verdict and Conclusion

After testing the 7970 Accelero Xtreme I must say that I am both impressed and disappointed.

Core temps were great while my system also became much more quiet. On the other hand, the lack of airflow almost killed my $550 video card and a lack of a proper manual for a long time was a huge disappointment.

If I could change a few things I would add in a tube of thermal paste instead of pre-applying a single use of paste to the heatsink. And adding a larger amount of G1 paste that has a couple of applications worth would be great.

Adding in an instruction manual in the package would also be a priority, as well as including a few more beefy heatsinks for the VRM area.

When it comes to the price Arctic has it listed for a whopping $99.90, plus shipping. Would I ever spend that much on a heatsink? No I would not. Shopping around it can be found for $83 to your door. While this is better than $100-ish I would find it extremely hard to spend that much on an aftermarket heatsink that mostly lowers the amount of noise.

Shall we summarize? There are pros:

• Good GPU-core cooling performance
• G1 thermal glue comes off easily.
• Very quiet compared to stock
• Tons of ram and MOSFET sinks

There are cons too:

• Takes up three slots
• G1 comes off easily
• G1 can only be used once, and hard to find more of it
• Much longer than actual video card
• No manual in-package
• Cannot properly cool secondary components on high-end cards
• Expensive

While GPU cooling is very good, the ability to properly cool secondary components is very much lacking. If you are looking to quiet down your system this is a good choice, but make sure that you have tons of airflow in your case or you will end up with a dead card sooner or later. 

SCORE
6.0/10

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