Fixing The Radeon R9 290 With Arctic's Accelero Xtreme III

[protogenic]

I can't find anything to confirm that you tested this inside a case, and I'm curious what it does to case and cpu temps compared to the reference card, and what it does to a second gpu running in crossfire mode.

I am sure TH does not test cards in cases because of varying airflow. Too many differences and variables someone may get. Temps already vary in different environments let alone a dirty or clean pc case that could be a mid or full tower with good or bad fans.

 

[f-14]

will work nicely with the newest version of the cooler master storm scout case as you can take the side vents and put a pair of 60-80 cfm 18-21db fans on the side panel to exhaust out 50% or more of the heat coming off the accelero.

"Also, remember that applying heat sinks using thermal adhesive creates a fairly permanent bond." until it meets liquid CO2 or liquid NO2 spray. most adhesives lose their sticking power at or below zeroº also 'goo gone' is a wonderful adhesive neutralizer before it dissipates. a squirt bottle with your air can tubing or tiny coffee creamer straw is a good way to get it where you need it.

 

[Avro Arrow]

People aren't really understanding why AMD uses the reference cooler that they do. Sure, the thing is loud and doesn't cool as well as a Gigabyte Windforce (similar to this accelero extreme cooler), but those are the general drawbacks of the blower design. The reason the blower design is used is because no matter how big or small the case is, as long as it has a full-height PCIe slot, the card can be used because it exhausts the hot air out of the case instead of into it. That means that it can be used by literally anyone, their levels of comfort may vary, but they can use it without melting the innards of their computers. Not everyone has a masive 24x24x9 case with 4 120mm fans like I do. Most people use a Mid-Tower or smaller. If you're running two of these in a Mid-Tower case without blower fans, you better have some high-performance air movers, otherwise you can forget about overclocking that unlocked CPU of yours. AMD had a working blower cooling solution so they used it, knowing full well that the third-party makers would make their own designs as well.

 

[f-14]

will work nicely with the newest version of the cooler master storm scout case as you can take the side vents and put a pair of 60-80 cfm 18-21db fans on the side panel to exhaust out 50% or more of the heat coming off the accelero.

"Also, remember that applying heat sinks using thermal adhesive creates a fairly permanent bond." until it meets liquid CO2 or liquid NO2 spray. most adhesives lose their sticking power at or below zeroº also 'goo gone' is a wonderful adhesive neutralizer before it dissipates. a squirt bottle with your air can tubing or tiny coffee creamer straw is a good way to get it where you need it.

 

[f-14]

will work nicely with the newest version of the cooler master storm scout case as you can take the side vents and put a pair of 60-80 cfm 18-21db fans on the side panel to exhaust out 50% or more of the heat coming off the accelero.

"Also, remember that applying heat sinks using thermal adhesive creates a fairly permanent bond." until it meets liquid CO2 or liquid NO2 spray. most adhesives lose their sticking power at or below zeroº also 'goo gone' is a wonderful adhesive neutralizer before it dissipates. a squirt bottle with your air can tubing or tiny coffee creamer straw is a good way to get it where you need it.

 

[Scblacksunshine]

or you can get something cheaper and work just as good. Gelid Icy cooler Rev.2, only drawback is non PWM fan but you can use the adapter to hook it up to the Mobo and control fan speed there or use a fan controller. Much cheaper than this and will include of the VRM heatsink, nothing missing. As for overclocking, much easier to use MSI afterburner than ATI software.

 

[Roland Of Gilead]

Being honest......articles like 'Fixing The Radeon R9 290 With Arctic's Accelero Xtreme III' or 'Tuning Radeon R9 290X: Replace The Thermal Paste For More Efficiency'.......what the f*** ar AMD up to. And why should any discerning buyer purchase these cards. For extreme performacnce???? With a do-it-yourself, fixer-upper way to make the cards work as one would expect. Asides from all the 'lets hope AMD can bring it' to Nvidia, I think this is a massive fail. I would not bother my rear end purchasing one of those. A 7950 boost on the other hand, yes, maybe. This in my opinion is a really poor launch from AMD. Bad show!!!!!

 

[RealBeast]

While very interested in the new AMD GPUs, I am very disappointed that AMD would use a cooler that reduces performance. I think that they should have increased the price $20 and included a reasonable cooling solution, not for OC, but for running at the full rated speed under load. OC'ers understand they need to do more often.

At least the HSF that comes with Intel CPUs is able to keep the CPU in a usable temp range under load at the full advertised speed as long as you don't OC (at least that is my experience from 30 or so Haswell builds for clients that didn't want upgraded cooling).

It seems AMD chose a poor option for reference cooling, I eagerly await their partners to show the way; fingers crossed as I am 5 generations out of date on GPUs. (and I am trying hard to be fair in the face of admitted personal bias for NVIDIA, at least the old EVGA lifetime warranty models -- ah the good old lifetime GPU warranty, not to mention those frequent driver updates).

 

[ingtar33]

that 1150 clock speed is actually on the low side. on several other forums i frequent people are hitting mid 1300's pretty consistently with aftermarket air coolers, and 1400s on water.

it seems the r9-290x is pretty much identical clock for clock to the 780ti... so putting a non-reference cooler onto it is almost mandatory; because when it's not temp throttling it's pacing nvidia's $700 monster.

The BIOS was locked. Without increasing the core voltage my sample runs only 1175 max. It is a lottery which numbers you get

crap, you're right. i forgot about that. the people hitting those numbers are using custom bios... apparently the process of flashing a bios into the r9-290/290x is pretty simple and straight forward.

heck... on one of those forums they're finding that all Powercolor r9-290 can be flashed and "unlocked" into r9-290x (about half the xfx versions can too, no others will work like that though)

This looks like a nice kit. The only question I would have is, how does this perform in an enclosed box? How much does the heat being dumped inside your computer effect the overall efficiency. I don't like to see reviews where the testbeds are open since they don't reflect real world installations.

case airflow is one of the least understood dynamics in the DIY community. Most people just say f-it and get a haf with all that open mesh area and fans. As anyone who's been forced to make high end systems work in the summer in phoenix with no AC can tell you, those cases actually aren't the best for airflow and venting heat. (they can be made pretty good, if you are careful with fan placement, but often they'll under-perform cases with less mesh).

Good case airflow is about obstructions, air direction and convection. One of the things that breaks up convection is excessive mesh. another is side-panel fans. generally i won't touch them unless i'm having issues with VRM/MB cooling and they're positioned to blow down onto that part of the board.

Pushing air up through the case is often ideal, so i look for ways to increase vertical airflow. This puts a premium on vertical orientation of CPU tower heatsinks, and top vents. I'm not a huge believer in the top back vent... though it can create a little airflow over a motherboard when you're using a watercooling system for the cpu, generally it's not a fan i pay much attention to, though i do use it if the mesh on the top of the case doesn't extend into the back corner, it CAN break up good case airflow.

Sorry i got off on a tangent. I guess all i'm saying is something like a r9-290x/290 venting hot air into a case isn't a huge concern to me. if you have your case airflow worked out right, it shouldn't be an issue at all.

 

[m32]

This is very encouraging! I can't wait for aftermarket cooler (I'm not buying something to void my warranty on purpose). This is going to be a must buy for me once AMD's partners release their versions. Good job, Toms.

 

[lowstandards]

Sounds about right. I use the same aftermarket cooler on my R9 290x. However, I am using VRM (letting the card/driver manage fan speeds based off of temps) and in CCC set target temp to 70 degrees and fan "up to" 100% and I have never seen temps hit higher than 69 degrees. I followed the directions of the cooler and applied all heatsinks to the VRM and memory. In my Corsaid 800D case, I've heard the fans on the cooler hit 32% fan speed (20 is minimum it keeps outside of games) in extended gaming sessions and it is still MUCH quieter than the stock cooling of the card.

 

[kdawgmaster]

have you guys tried to remove the vram heatsinks yet? i would like to do this but im worried the thermal adhesive wont be removeable

 

[surjerrylee]

I noticed that you said the package contents only come with 12 memory heatsinks, but in the guide I noticed you used 16, so I'm assuming you used a kit for the old GTX cards? Also, the guide didn't include instructions on how to install the backplate, something that I was really looking forward to reading. All-in-all I am convinced on getting this cooler and pairing it with the R9 290 (not X).

 

[FormatC]

The backplate is self-exploring and described in the manual. Only 4 screws and 4 spacers, this is really easy.
Yes, I used an additional kit, as described in my article.

 

[bl4c]

great technological articles lately (290 fan speed, thermal pastes, ...) !
nice to see a hardware site actually trying to live up to its name

would you be able to do a comparison between after market coolers ?
- Arctic Accelero Xtreme III
- Arctic Accelero Hybrid
- Gelid Rev. 2 ICY VISION

(i think these are the only normal "ready-to-install" coolers available)

on a side note, i hope this comment appears in the US-site .com, not only in the UK .co.uk site ... just 5 comments there

 

[FormatC]

One problem - this kind of card mod is irreversible and I can't use a handful of fresh cards to build our own versions
SeE this article as example

 

[Calculatron]

Go Arctic!

 

[RazberyBandit]

"Obviously, if you spend $400 on a new Radeon R9 290 and immediately take it apart, your warranty is void."

Are all the Vendor's cards like this? If I remember correctly Sapphire used to allow (or still does) people to take the stock cooler off to attach a waterblock without it voiding the warranty.

No, they are not all like this. XFX and MSI have both allowed owners to remove/replace the stock HS/Fan for years. Things may have changed with these new cards, but I've seen several XFX manufacturer replies on Newegg telling users that the "Void Warranty" stick is placed on all cards by default, yet doesn't apply to North American owners. NA consumers have a much more mod-friendly warranty than foreign-market consumers.

 

[RazberyBandit]

One problem - this kind of card mod is irreversible and I can't use a handful of fresh cards to build our own versions
SeE this article as example

That's only correct if you use the supplied permanent thermal adhesive. If you mix a permanent adhesive with a standard silicon-based thermal compound, it sticks really well, but also loses its superglue-like level of adhesion. I've done so using 50/50 mixtures of Arctic Silver's "Arctic Alumina" and "Ceramique" with great success. Heatsinks bonded using such a mix stay in place until twisted/wiggled free. You just have to be sure to mix them thoroughly.

 

[youssef 2010]

Waiting for the board partners also means you get to keep the warranty

 

[cobra5000]

Any chance you guys can give this one away, in a contest? My rig could use some Radeon 290/Arctic goodness!

 

[tempodan]

Im in the process of using this guide right now, letting everything cure....see what happens!
Anyways, I sent an email to Arctic and they sent me the additional 4 heatsinks and 2 tubes of thermal for free, so feel free to reach out to them for those who are doing this.

 

[i7Baby]

Has anyone tried the Gelid cooler?
Ref: http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=207_314&products_id=25815
Seems a bit cheaper and has the right VRM Heatsinks. Gets good reviews.

 

[i7Baby]

Has anyone tried the Gelid cooler?
Ref: http://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=207_314&products_id=25815
Seems a bit cheaper and has the right VRM Heatsinks. Gets good reviews.

 

[stewthedude]

My next build will probably be an AMD build. Once they get these after market coolers I just can't justify the money I've spent on my Intel/Nviida build. I just hope AMD comes out with something similar to Shadowplay. I'm really enjoying capturing my moment's past on BF4.