Testing and Results
I used HWMonitor to log the maximum temperatures seen on each cooler. I tested them both for idle temperatures as well as the maximum temperature seen during a run of Heaven DX9, a very brutal GPU benchmark, and the STALKER Call of Pripyat benchmark. STALKER is very nearly as brutal as Heaven DX9 but lasts far longer, it gives a good example of prolonged game performance. Below are the stock clock speeds and such of the card I used for testing:
Ready for the results? Me too:
Yes, that’s right. Without a fan the Arctic Accelero S1 PLUS has a lower full load temperature than the stock cooler’s idle temperature. Best of all, it is 100% silent. Not just quiet, mind you, but silent.
For fun I did some overclocking with the Accelero S1 PLUS and a low speed very quiet fan on it. At stock voltages the 8800GT managed a very impressive 780MHz core speed and 1200MHz ram speed. With the stock cooler it overheated and failed at 730MHz core and 1120MHz ram speed. That’s quite the difference! With a tiny bit of extra core voltage the core did 800MHz quite happily and still ran far cooler than the stock cooler at stock clock speeds!
Click the GPUz photo below to be taken to the full screenshot.
Impressive stuff, I am very pleased with the cooling power of this cooler!
After benching I disassembled the cooler and found that the RAM and MOSFET heatsinks come off easily as promised. More easily than I’d like, really.
The G1 peels off the RAM chips and heatsinks easily, but does leave a bit of a greasy residue that will need to be cleaned off with acetone before you use sticky type thermal tape on the ram or heatsinks. You’ll need to do that if you take the heatsinks off and want to mount them on another card, as the G1 is a one time use sort of thing. Alternatively you can buy more Arctic G1 of course, while the mixing and painting is time consuming it takes even more time to trim sticky thermal tape to the proper size.
