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Arctic Cooling has really made a name for themselves in the PC accessories market. Starting with unique cooling products, they have branched out and designed equally unique cases and power supplies; all the while, sticking with the key design element that "silence is golden". Today, their name is synonymous with low noise and the latest round of video card cooling products is no exception. The nVidia GTX 280 GPU is one of the hottest (literally and figuratively) chips on the market right now and Arctic Cooling has attempted to tame the beast with the aptly named Accelero XTREME GTX 280.
The packaging is fairly unassuming but everyone knows you can't judge a book by it's cover.
On the backside Arctic Cooling lists the main features of the Accelero Xtreme GTX 280 as well as the specifications and list of compatible cards. You can visit the Arctic Cooling product page for more information on the details but we'll outline them here too.
| Model |
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| Material |
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| Fan |
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| Fan Speed |
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| Air Flow |
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| Max. Cooling Capacity |
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| Bearing |
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| Weight |
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| Dimensions |
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| Compatibility |
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A few things to note in the specifications is the compatibility with the GTX 260 and newly released GTX 285. The Accelero Xtreme GTX 280 is more versatile than the product name might lead you to believe. Also worth pointing out are the fan characteristics. First and foremost, there are three 92mm fans on this thing, each fan sporting low noise specs (of course) and Arctic Cooling's favorite Fluid Dynamic Bearing. These three fans are pulse width modulation (PWM) compatible so you can connect a single 4-pin connector to the video card. Fan speeds are automatically adjusted by the video card based on internal temperature measurements. Talk about hassle free! Once inside the package you will find quite the pile of parts.
As pictured above, there is a large aluminum heat spreader plate that affixes to the backside of the card to cool the memory chips on that side. The blue color of these heat spreaders is due to a thin plastic film covering one side of the parts (which can be easily removed). The larger of the three finned aluminum heat sinks are designed for the NVIVO chip and two memory IC's while the other two smaller ones are for the rest of the memory IC's on the front side of the card. The thermal pads all look similar but they are in fact slightly different so make sure you know which ones you need to be putting on which heat sink. There are also two of the six screws that are slightly different that screw into the larger NVIVO heat sink. And yes, that is a big ol' sticker for you case badge junkies (a small Arctic Cooling sticker is also included but not shown in the picture above).
Last but not least, Arctic Cooling included a single sheet of printed installation instructions (double sided). While not glamorous, it certainly gets the job done. If they were able to shave off a few bucks on the final cost of this product by having simple, straight-forward instructions like this, then we say, "thank you." You can also download the PDF version from Arctic Cooling here.