Date: September 24th, 2008
Article by: Joe Anderson (Hardware Reviewer)
Edited by: Nathan Glentworth (Owner / Head Editor)
Product was submitted by: Arctic Cooling
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PRODUCT INSTALLATION AND TESTING
The support clips have to be placed on the card and the cooler hinged down over them, to be secured by the other part of the clip. This takes a bit of fiddling around to find a place where the clips don't interfere with board components or the heatpipes on the cooler.
Also, the cooler comes very close to some of the caps and other board components. However, I knew it would fit because I took advantage of the “Height Restriction Drawing” on the Arctic Cooling website. This drawing shows the maximum height components can be and still fit under the S1.
As you can see, the S1 changes my 7800 GT from a single slot to a two slot card (which many aftermarket coolers do,) but it also changes it into a silent card. But what about SLI?
Well, Arctic Cooling can supply (but does not include) a long, flexible bridge that will allow two cards to be run in SLI mode with the S1 in place.
I've tested all the coolers in the comparison in the bare frame pictured above. This eliminates any effects that a case might introduce. Keep in mind that temps inside your case will be higher; how much higher depends on the case and airflow.
For this review, I've chosen a DFI Infinity P965-S motherboard coupled with an Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 Allendale processor (overclocked to 2.4 GHz, +0.1 Vcore.) The other components are listed below.
- Buffalo Firestix PC2-6400 (1024mb X 2) memory
- Zalman ZM600-HP heatpipe modular 600 Watt PSU
- Western Digital Raptor 740 SATA hard drive
- Samsung DVD-RW SATA drive
Idle temperature was recorded after reboot and the system at desktop for one hour.
Load temperatures were recorded after three loops of AquaMark3 and 3Dmark05. Arctic Silver 5 was used on all coolers and a constant ambient temperature of 21C was maintained in the testing environment. The results are as follows:
The results are impressive, to say the least. Operating silently, the Accelero S1 was bested by the stock cooler by only a few degrees. The S1 trounced the all-copper Thermalright V2 in passive mode (though, to be fair, the V2 wasn't designed to be a passive cooler.) Arctic Cooling also has an accessory fan package called the “Turbo Module” for this cooler. Look for an upcoming review here at Tweaknews. It'll be interesting to see how the S1 performs with some active cooling. Stay tuned!
