- Aug 30, 2011
- 20
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- 18,510
The reference coolers which came on my 570's last December were sufficient to keep temps in check, however while playing games such as BF3 the fans would ramp up causing a fair amount of noise. So I set out to find a quieter VGA cooler, and decided on the beastly Accelero Extreme Plus II - arguably the best VGA air cooler on the market. We shall see about that.
A few days later I received the pair, requiring 3 slots of height and measuring 288mm (11.3in) long means my Antec DF-85 case is going to look pretty full with two of these chilling out in there.
Lets get down to business...
Flip the card over and you'll be greeted with well over 20 screws:
Use a T6 Torx driver to remove the little buggers, and a philips head screw driver for the screw on the back of the card and the GPU cooler. Be careful not to strip these as some of them may require a little effort. Overall I had very little issues.
I had a trouble with the very last philips screw, because the head of the screw was raised off the board surface, working it out with a pair of pliers did the trick:
Yes, there are A LOT of screws between two 570s... :roll:
Stock coolers removed:
After cleaning the bare card from residue left over from the stock cooler, it was time to prepare the glue which is used to attach the heat sinks. I found some of the packaging useful when stirring the two packs of adhesive for a total of 5 minutes as the manual instructed.
Afterwords I had 15mins to glue on the RAM, VRMs...etc heat-sinks. While it was curing I put pennies over top of them to apply a tad of pressure. I had never delt with this stuff before so as a test I also glued some extra heat sinks together so I could get a better picture as to how well this stuff actually works. Even after 3hrs it didn't seem like it was holding very well and had me a tad worried. So I left the cards sit over-night. That morning it had definitively improved and it took a bit of effort to separate them. I heated one up to about 180 degrees F to test its resistance to heat, it was a little easier to separate them, but still seemed to hold sufficiently.
Test heat sinks:
All heat sinks installed:
Now it was the simple matter of bolting the cooler onto the GPU, be sure to use the 1-4-2-3 pattern to apply even pressure on the GPU. Then remember to hook up the fans to the board. Here are the coolers now installed and ready to go into the case:
Very nice:
At idle I'm very happy with the results, I pretty much see a drop of 20C across the board, and they are nearly dead silent, even when ramped up to 70%. Keep in mind GPU2 is running two displays at 1920x1080 while the other is running only one display. GPU2 also sits on top, this is why it shows higher temps, but it still manages to idle cooler than GPU1 on a stock cooler - impressive.
After a few saturation's/heat cycles I felt it was the right time to put em under load. In Heaven maxed out on extreme tessellation for 15 minutes at just 40% fan speed, GPU2 only hit 59C while GPU1 stayed in the low 50s - very impressive - and QUIET! That is still a good 20C under the performance of the stock cooler, almost 30C for GPU1. And it does it all without breaking a sweat, crank it up higher and I'm sure I could keep both cards in the 40s under high load. Keep in mind all other fans on the PC are set at their lowest speed settings.
All this and its now much quieter than my 360 while playing games
A few days later I received the pair, requiring 3 slots of height and measuring 288mm (11.3in) long means my Antec DF-85 case is going to look pretty full with two of these chilling out in there.
Lets get down to business...
Flip the card over and you'll be greeted with well over 20 screws:
Use a T6 Torx driver to remove the little buggers, and a philips head screw driver for the screw on the back of the card and the GPU cooler. Be careful not to strip these as some of them may require a little effort. Overall I had very little issues.
I had a trouble with the very last philips screw, because the head of the screw was raised off the board surface, working it out with a pair of pliers did the trick:
Yes, there are A LOT of screws between two 570s... :roll:
Stock coolers removed:
After cleaning the bare card from residue left over from the stock cooler, it was time to prepare the glue which is used to attach the heat sinks. I found some of the packaging useful when stirring the two packs of adhesive for a total of 5 minutes as the manual instructed.
Afterwords I had 15mins to glue on the RAM, VRMs...etc heat-sinks. While it was curing I put pennies over top of them to apply a tad of pressure. I had never delt with this stuff before so as a test I also glued some extra heat sinks together so I could get a better picture as to how well this stuff actually works. Even after 3hrs it didn't seem like it was holding very well and had me a tad worried. So I left the cards sit over-night. That morning it had definitively improved and it took a bit of effort to separate them. I heated one up to about 180 degrees F to test its resistance to heat, it was a little easier to separate them, but still seemed to hold sufficiently.
Test heat sinks:
All heat sinks installed:
Now it was the simple matter of bolting the cooler onto the GPU, be sure to use the 1-4-2-3 pattern to apply even pressure on the GPU. Then remember to hook up the fans to the board. Here are the coolers now installed and ready to go into the case:
Very nice:
At idle I'm very happy with the results, I pretty much see a drop of 20C across the board, and they are nearly dead silent, even when ramped up to 70%. Keep in mind GPU2 is running two displays at 1920x1080 while the other is running only one display. GPU2 also sits on top, this is why it shows higher temps, but it still manages to idle cooler than GPU1 on a stock cooler - impressive.
After a few saturation's/heat cycles I felt it was the right time to put em under load. In Heaven maxed out on extreme tessellation for 15 minutes at just 40% fan speed, GPU2 only hit 59C while GPU1 stayed in the low 50s - very impressive - and QUIET! That is still a good 20C under the performance of the stock cooler, almost 30C for GPU1. And it does it all without breaking a sweat, crank it up higher and I'm sure I could keep both cards in the 40s under high load. Keep in mind all other fans on the PC are set at their lowest speed settings.
All this and its now much quieter than my 360 while playing games
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