Arctic Cooling's Accelero series has been very popular for a while now, and are now being included as factory equipment on some custom design graphics add-in boards. Today Rage3D is taking a look at the Accelero Xtreme GTX Pro, designed for the GeForce 200 series, to see if its performance might just extend the life of your aging graphics card.

Arctic Cooling rose to prominence in the R300 era with VGA Silencer. With designs for both NVIDIA and ATI cards, the VGA Silencer series was for many the beginning of the dual slot external exhaust design trend. Following the Silencer series came the Accelero branding, applied to triangular fin shaped and massive oversized fin array designs. The twin turbo module for the Accelero S1 started the trend we now see in the Accelero Twin Turbo, and now Accelero Xtreme.

Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme GTX Pro

Specified with a cooling capacity of 250W, the Accelero Xtreme GTX Pro is compatible with NVIDIA 200 GTX series cards, from the GTX 260 through to the GTX 285. The monstrous copper base meets five copper heatsinks which disperse the heat generated by the GPU core into 83 aluminum fins. Atop the giant cooler sit three PWM-controlled 2000RPM 92mm fans, for full board cooling. VRM and memory heatsinks are included for all card designs. Other graphics board design variants are available, for AMD 5000/6000 and NVIDIA 400/500 series graphics boards.

Accelero Xtreme GTX Pro

Today we're testing this ~$60 GPU cooler on an older BFG GeForce GTX 275 OC card to see if the claims of decreasing GPU temperature by 21C are true. Additionally we'll look at how the cooler affects overclocking, and in-use temperatures.