Arctic Accelero Hybrid 7970 VGA Cooler Review

I found the Arctic Accelero Hybrid 7970 listed on Newegg for $159.99 and in the UK I couldn’t find it but I could find the Arctic Accelero Hybrid (which is the same product but aimed at both Nvidia and AMD cards not just AMD) for £116.99. Quite frankly I am very disappointed with this pricing from Arctic when you consider this is just a Corsair H55/ Antec Kuhler 620 strapped to a graphics card, and those Asetek 120mm AIOs cost only around £50/$60 at retail, let alone OEM prices. Obviously they provide you with a bit more than that, you get a plastic shround with an 80mm fan, tonnes of VRAM and VRM heatsinks and some high quality thermal paste – but does that justify a more than doubling of the cost? I think not.

If we put the price aside for a moment, then I can say the Arctic Accelero Hybrid 7970 was a good overall product. It offers an excellent amount of cooling performance that is difficult to find from even the best graphics cards cooling solutions. It offers active VRM and VRAM cooling with the 80mm fan, it offers passive VRM and VRAM cooling with an abundance of aluminium heatsinks, excellent thermal glue is provided and best of all it only uses up two PCI expansion slots in width (plus a 120mm fan mounting area for the radiator) – so it won’t block your other expansion cards or obstruct any SLI/CFX bridges.

Yet the Arctic Accelero Hybrid 7970 doesn’t exactly feel special. For the mammoth price tag you essentially get a Corsair H55 strapped to a video card with a very cheap feeling (and looking) plastic shroud and a couple of very low cost fans with unattractive multicoloured cabling that isn’t sleeved along with other fan and pump cables that are also multicoloured and not sleeved. Furthermore while the installation procedure is clear, the parts provided don’t make your life easy. The double sided adhesive rings are near impossible to remove quickly and can easily be ripped, the screws are all of different shapes and sizes and you’d need about four different screw drivers, not to mention all the screws are low quality metal that cross-thread easily. Why couldn’t Arctic have just used standard screws all of the same size?  They didn’t even provide full length radiator fan screws but instead provided only normal case fan screws meaning you need a slimline screwdriver just to install the fan to the radiator!

Pros

• Good cooling performance
• Totally silent
• Active and passive VRAM/VRM cooling
• High quality thermal glue and paste
• Double slot design
• Flexible mounting options
• 2 year warranty

Cons

• Cheap looking and feeling plastic shround
• Price is verging on the ridiculous
• Mounting procedure is complex and fiddly, Arctic should standardise the screws used, make better quality double sided adhesive rings and provide proper radiator screws
• All cables are unsleeved and just look low quality, not acceptable given the price point

eTeknix says: The Arctic Accelero Hybrid 7970 has great cooling and acoustic performance in a small and convenient form factor. Yet it is let down by its cheap look and feel, the shoddy quality of some of the mounting hardware, a total lack of attention to detail with the presentation and worst of all its ridiculously high price tag. While I cannot personally recommend it because of the previously mentioned points, I can see that some end users may find this product suits their needs if they are space constrained, need extreme cooling and have quite a large budget. Let’s hope more cooling companies and graphics card vendors try their hand at making this type of VGA cooling solution to force the prices down and the quality up.

Thanks to Arctic for providing this review sample.