Introduction

It has been three and a half months since our first review of current generation aftermarket video card coolers. The Zalman VF900 performed very well, handling the heat from ATI’s Radeon X1900 XTX, the hottest single card on the market, at low noise levels. Since then NVIDIA has released its 7950GX2 card, consisting of two G71 GPUs and consuming a maximum of 143Watts, 23W higher than ATI’s flagship. However due to the 7950GX2’s unique PCB design, there are no compatible aftermarket coolers available at the moment.

ATI’s flagship consumes the most power due in part to its 48-pixel shader architecture and more complicated eight-channel memory controller, consisting of eight 32-bit memory controllers. Previous GPUs with a 256-bit internal memory interface relied on just four 64-bit memory controllers. ATI has also added dedicated logic for flow control with their dispatch processor and branch unit in each pixel shader quad. All this adds up to a GPU that contains 384 million transistors.

In comparison, NVIDIA’s GeForce 7900 GTX only contains 278 million transistors, resulting in a power consumption of a mere 85Watts. While NVIDIA employs a massive aluminum cooler with 4 heatpipes and a huge 80mm fan, ATI uses a smaller, all-copper cooler with a poorly designed 60mm fan that must spin much faster than NVIDIA’s 80mm fan to pull the same amount of air. This results in noise levels of over 60db when ATI’s cooler revs up to full speeds.

While ATI’s solution effectively cools the X1900XT(X) and X1800XT cards, the vacuum-like noise is practically unbearable when the fan is running at full speed. NVIDIA isn’t completely off the hook however, the stock cooling on the GeForce 7900 GT and 7600 GT can get pretty noisy as well.

This is where third party manufacturers create replacement coolers. Arctic Cooling, Thermaltake, and previously reviewed Zalman have created alternative solutions that either provides better performance, lower noise levels, or preferably, both. Today we’ll be looking at Arctic Cooling’s Accelero X1, designed for the nVidia’s 6800 series, 7800 series, and 7900GTX cards, the Accelero X2, designed for the X1800 and X1900 series cards, and finally the Thermaltake Tide Water compact video card water cooler, compatible with all current video cards. With street prices on the Radeon X1800 XT below $200 on Price Grabber, and the X1900 XT quickly falling below $350, we figured now was a good time to revisit the performance you could get from these new coolers.