Sign in with
Sign up | Sign in

Custom Cooling: Deepcool's Dracula And Arctic's Accelero Xtreme

Custom Cooling: Deepcool's Dracula And Arctic's Accelero Xtreme
By

Overclocking AMD's Radeon HD 7970 requires effective cooling, but the company's design is incompatible with most aftermarket heat sinks. Arctic and Deepcool claim to have solutions able to get the job done, without the reference cooler's loud fan.

The factory-installed GPU coolers used on today’s graphics cards are generally pretty specific. You can't yank the thermal solution from a GeForce GTX 680 and drop it onto a GeForce GTX 660 Ti. In contrast, the companies that design aftermarket coolers try to make them a lot more flexible, accounting for differences in mounting holes, PCB dimensions, and the varying power and memory circuitry found on one card to the next.

Occasionally, AMD or Nvidia modify things even more dramatically, introducing a new design that sends ripples of change through the aftermarket. And that's exactly what happened when the Radeon HD 7970 and 7950 emerged, both of which come with reference coolers that abandon the typically-flat cooling block design. Instead, they use a large, thick shim around the Tahiti GPU, putting it below the surrounding components and relying on a raised contact area for heat transfer away from the graphics processor.

Of course, this cooler design renders AMD's other implementations unusable on the Radeon HD 7900s. It also torpedoes the multitude of aftermarket designs intended to work with as many cards as possible. Most of the companies that manufacture graphics card coolers are used to dealing with dramatic changes, however, and as we wrote this story up, there were already two vendors selling new products to replace the problematic thermal solution covering AMD's Radeon HD 7970: Arctic's Accelero Xtreme 7970 and Deepcool's Dracula 7970. We previewed the Dracula (sold under EKL's name) in Extreme Air Cooling: Our Five-Slot (Quiet) Radeon HD 7970.

In addition, one other manufacturer came up with a way to use a more generic heat sink and fan combination on the Radeon HD 7900-series cards. The EK-VGA Supreme HF HD7970 Cu Adapter from EKWB Cooling Solutions is basically a copper shim that fills the space between a more standard cooling block and the Radeon HD 7970's Tahiti GPU.

Available at Scan for about £2.50, the adapter is perhaps the least-expensive solution for anyone who already has an aftermarket cooler and wants to re-use it. But how much efficiency do you lose? After all, the adapter is responsible for transferring thermal energy between two surfaces that'd normally be touching, and paste on each.

In order to illustrate the effect of this, we're testing Arctic's Accelero Xtreme III with the copper shim installed and comparing it to the performance of Arctic's Accelero Xtreme 7970. The only functional differences between them are the shape of their cooling blocks and the presence of the shim. 

Let's consider the other coolers we're testing, too:


Reference Radeon HD 7970 Cooler
Arctic Accelero Xtreme 7970/III
Deepcool Dracula 7970
Dimensions:
277(L) × 96(W) × 32(H) mm288(L) × 104(W) × 54(H) mm254(L) × 100(W) × 44(H) mm
Weight:764 grams
653 grams556 grams (heat sink only)
Fans:Single 75 mm  radial fan
Three 92 mm axial fansUp to three 120 mm or two 140 mm axial fans (none included)
Power Cables:
Four-pin graphics card fan headerTwo graphics card fan headers (three- or four-pin)
Dual-fan to single-fan header adapter
Construction:Copper Cooling Block and Cooling FinsCopper Cooling Block, Five 6 mm Copper Heat Pipes, and Aluminum Cooling FinsCopper Cooling Block, Silver Nickel Plating, Six 6 mm Copper Heat Pipes, and Aluminum Cooling Fins
Price
N/A
7970: £55 (Dabs)
III: ~£52(Systo)
UK Price Not Available


AMD's reference cooler for the Radeon HD 7970 doesn't need heat pipes; it instead uses a copper vapor chamber with an array of fins attached. A single 75 mm centrifugal fan pulls air in from the chassis and exhausts out the I/O bracket. Technically, this is the approach we prefer to see taken because it doesn't recirculate hot air inside your case, affecting other components. Unfortunately, the resulting temperatures are merely acceptable, and the noise generated in getting there is pretty unbearable under load.

Do you see the raised GPU contact surface on the vapor chamber? This is what makes the Radeon HD 7900-series cooler unique.


Below is a picture of the naked reference card, showing the thick protective shim surrounding AMD's Tahiti GPU.

Ask a Category Expert

Create a new thread in the UK Article comments forum about this subject

Example: Notebook, Android, SSD hard drive

Display 2 comments.
This thread is closed for comments
  • 0 Hide
    Pailin , 4 October 2012 00:56
    Would have been nice to have bench marked with 3 fans on both coolers to give a better representation
    even if the 3rd fan was different if you did not have 3 identical fans
    I feel
  • 0 Hide
    tsenng , 5 February 2013 20:23
    I just installed the 7970 extreme cooler from arctic on my HIS iceq turbo X 7870 card.

    Even with a fairly hefty overclock 1000/4800 mhz stock up to 1170/5300mhz overclock my card on the same game same settings barely breaks 50degrees celcius and it is incredibly quiet.

    i DID have to cut my HDD rack tower inside the cabinet since the card is monstrously long with this cooler attached :D 

    I highly recommend this aftermarket cooler as it is quite fantastic on temps/noise compared to anything else out there with air cooling.