Ok, this isn’t a tech review, just a few words about hands-on experience with a third party VGA cooler. I’ll leave benchmarking to the experts 😉

Unfortunately a graphics card fan packed up on us in an overclocked i7 system. It crashed, burned and even produced the dreaded BSOD 🙁 After determining that overheating was the problem we decided to go for an Arctic Accelero Twin Turbo 3 to remedy the situation. £40 seemed a reasonable amount to gamble on a £300 card.

The GPU is sandwiched between the fans and the backside RAM and VRM cooler and installation was pretty straightforward with no glue needed. MX-4 compound is pre-applied. You only have to make cut outs in a protecting film, apply the thermal conducting pads, and screw the lot together. Hardest part was finding the last screw holding on the old cooler-it was under the sticker saying do not remove, removal will invalidate your warranty 😀

PC ran noticeably cooler and was completely cured of all the overheating problems. In fact I’d go so far as to say it runs better than when new. Quieter too. Sooner or later we always seem to end up with heat related performance issues and so on a recent Haswell build we’ve put a non-stock CPU heatsink on right at the start.