Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme 7970 Graphics Card Cooler

I bought this cooler for use on a Sapphire HD6970 2Gb card. Removing the noisy stock cooler was very easy (see U-tube videos) it took about 10 minutes. Then as suggested by the instructions I cleaned the ram chips with a rubber erasure to remove any residue from the sticky pads. After which I used some Isopropyl Alcohol (IPA) on All the chips to be fitted with heatsinks. It's important to ensure the chips are clean before you stick the heatsinks on or they may fall off! Also do the GPU chip.

You will find a vast array of heatsinks included with the kit, you wont need them all, just the ones intended for your card. My cooler came with the new single tube glue which was easy to use. They claim a setting time of one hour, I left mine for 2 ½ hours before I moved on to fitting the fan assembly. At the time my room temp was 30c so I guess it would have set OK in an hour, I just wanted to be sure they were on to stay!

Apart from the heatsinks for the ram chips, I fitted the 5mmX 25mm heatsinks to the very small bank of chips (to the right of the ram chips) which run from top to bottom of the card, four heatsinks required. Then another ram heatsink (15x13mm) to the embedded multi sided chip on the right center of the board, looks like a controlling north bridge?

I then fitted the four little white spacers onto the GPU mounting holes, the four black ones goes on the rear of the card (along with a black sticky pad), note it maybe different for your card make sure you use the correct spacers. When you fit the main cooler please ensure the copper block IS in contact with the GPU chip or your going to burn your card out real fast! Also ensure the cooler is not touching anything else or it may short out.

Don’t panic there is lots of room to fit this cooler, just take your time & do it right check everything twice!

There are two power options for the fans, a 7v connector or a 12v connector, it's so quiet on the 12 volts theres little point in using the 7v.

Mine works very well indeed, with the stock cooler on manual fan control set at 50% it was noisy, at 100% it was like a jet taking off, but now you just don’t notice the three 90mm fans, which run at low rpm so are super quite, eq to about 15% on the stock cooler under manual control. It's dropped the temp down to 37c at idle (30c room temp!) plus about 43-50c under high work load. I'm well pleased with it, a great buy!

The only thing I would say is that Arctic market this as a “7970” cooler, but it will in fact fit a large range of graphics cards which I feel if Arctic had made that fact clearer they would sell many more than they currently do.

The packaging states it fits : HD 7970, 7950, 7870, 7850, 6970, 6950, 6870, 6850, 6790, 5870, 5850,5830.

Also don’t expect much (If any) help as to what heatsinks fit what chips, regardless of what card you have, just remember you wont need them all. Use your common sense.

Good luck.