Arctic Accelero Twin Turbo 6990 VGA Cooler Review

The HD 6990 has two GPUs on it, so to get our temperatures we worked out the average. As you can see the Arctic cooler truly shines when it comes to thermal performance on the GPU cores. We saw 5 degrees less at idle, 20 degrees less under gaming load and 10 degrees less at Furmark load. All very impressive numbers which would probably give you some more overclocking headroom if your power supply can cope with the extra power draw.

I always assumed that the stock cooler would perform better on the VRM because the stock fan was placed directly on top of the VRM area whereas the Arctic cooler’s dual fan design has a gap in the middle where the VRM is situated. In realistic usage scenarios (idle and gaming load) the Arctic cooler is competitive with the stock cooler on VRM temperatures, so that isn’t too much of an issue since VRM can safely go to 120 degrees before you get any issues and we were only seeing temperatures 60 degrees and below.

Under Furmark load you can see that the stock cooler gives noticeably better VRM temperatures. However, the VRM will operate happily under 120 degrees celsius, and we were seeing temperatures of 80 degrees~ when running Furmark so no one should ever encounter issues even when overclocking.

I am unhappy Arctic have let VRM temperatures slide a bit, although this is only going to be an issue for users using Furmark (or similar GPU burn in applications) because no real-world applications are this intensive and demanding. 100% GPU usage is one thing, but 100% GPU usage under Furmark is totally different – it is significantly more power consuming and heat producing.