ARCTIC Accelero Hybrid 7970 Extreme VGA Cooler - AMD Radeon, Liquid/Air Combo Utimate Cooling

Pros: Cools extremely effectively.
Whisper quiet

Cons: insanely difficult install. not for the faint of heart
to use their heatsinks you have to permanently glue them to your memory chips on your card. (was NOT a fan of this, did something different, see below)
very very expensive for the same item as the basic version but with a tad more copper.

Other Thoughts: ended up buying an open box of the standard version of this on sale to put on my radeon hd7950. i purchased a swiftech full cover heatsink to cover the rest of the card rather than glue their heatsinks on or use their fan. dremeled out the inside of the heatsink to accommodate the arctic waterpump and had to dremel the water pump bracket down to fit inside it as well. i cut my own copper shim to make contact between the water pump and gpu. it was alot of work but i now have a fantastic liquid cooler on my 7950 and by the time i was done it cost me less than $100! not everyone will go this route as you stand a very good chance of bricking your card if you dont know what you're doing but it CAN be done and works very very well. temperatures in crossfire have literally halved going this route for me while installing only on the primary card.

Pros: Cools GPU down to 65 full load (from 80C stock).
Very very quiet even at 100% fan.

Cons: Does not have cooling (airflow) on the #1 VRM, temperatures shot up to 90-100C before I pulled the plug. 7900 cards have VRM #1 near the crossfire port and VRM #2 near the power connectors. The 7970 arctic cooler does not blow air over the #1 VRM at all, even though they tell you to put a heatsink on it.

If you are going to pay $160 for a cooler, it better sure as hell cool the ENTIRE card.

This may be ok for medium gaming, but high VRM temps can heat up other components and wear down the life of the card (although they can handle up to 120C). You cannot overclock with this cooler and keep the card safe.

It is a design flaw in the product, because the previous version (non-7970 arctic hybrid) did not have to take this into consideration. This version of the cooler is pretty much identical to its predecessor. 7900 cards VRMs run a lot hotter also because of the greater electricity requirement, but Accelero did not take this into consideration.

I took an 80mm fan and placed it blowing over VRM #1 position and cooled it by nearly 7C, something they should have considered in the design.

The install can be difficult (although I've done 5 at this point) for the new guy.

Other Thoughts: If you are only concerned about GPU temperatures and not the rest of the PCB, this cooler will keep your GPU @ 60-70C max full load. However, the 7900 cards VRMs heat up a TON and should not be ignored. These can be checked in GPU-Z.

Pros: It cooled my card, barely.

Cons: Crazy install. I took my time and made sure I did it right. but seriously....some of these components could have come pre-installed. I have a 7950 Sapphire 4L. My card was at 80 C before this cooler at full LTC mining. After reading the reviews I expected to be somewhere in the 60's at least. After the install my temps held at 72 C. Are you serious? $160 later and all you can give me is 8 C. Waist of my time and money.

Other Thoughts: find another cooling solution

Pros: At this time, none. Once I receive my RMA and finish the install and run more tests, then I will upgrade my review.

Cons: Illustration of how to install heatsinks on 7970 is deceiving. One picture shows a heatsink being placed on a small black chip next to the GPU, however this placement is impossible with the fan and gpu heatsink in place. Their illustration

My first 7970 unit ever ordered showed up with a failed radiator. GPU temps shot up to 100C and VRM held around 80-90. Waiting for RMA.

Other Thoughts: No company is perfect. The first 3 installs of these coolers on Radeon 6950s went just fine keeping GPU temps around 50-60C and VRM temps under 90C (full blast bitcoin mining).

Pros: It did cool

Cons: the pump made an irritating noise, the cooler offered no support for the card itself letting the card droop sending one of the heat sinks into the fan. the instruction were setup to be compatible with several different cards causing them to be misleading and causing me to watch videos on how to install the cooler for four hours

Other Thoughts: Never again. Already sent the cooler back for a refund a week ago and I've had no progress report since. overall a bad experience and return shipping cost was nearly a quarter of the cards full price

Pros: This cooler dropped temps on my NVIDIA QUADRO 4000 from 85°C to 40°C under full rendering load of 5 videos deep in Adobe CS6. I know 85°C is like 200°F. You could light a cig off it, but I digress. This still has AMAZING PERFORMANCE to say the least! Accelero is super universal too. More than enough resources to cool any VGA card. If you're having temp issues, this is the one for you if you don't want to buy an entire water cooling solution.

Cons: *It was difficult to mount up to the video card.
*Price is steep, but a new video card burned up by heat would be more expensive for me.

Other Thoughts: Take your time and do it right. Follow the steps and you'll do fine. (it says wait 60 seconds, wait 2 - 5 mins to be sure)

Pros: cools

Cons: hard to install
glue is messy
awful expensive
makes loud grinding sounds after it runs for awhile

Other Thoughts: grinding noise was awful-started out quiet but started grinding after a few hours-returned it -was for a 7870 xfx-under full load arctic cooled it to about 106f-am using an old red zalman cooler that i had on my 5850-temps are about 115f under load-red 1 from zalman-considering the zalman cost about 40 dollars and runs a few degrees warmer vs arctics thats about 160 dollars-you do the math

Pros: Keeps the GPU Cool.

Cons: PRICE,

AMD Version is $50 more, why?, because of the shape of the waterblock (the raised surface).

Other Thoughts: Just buy the cheaper Version, a $4 copper shim and a SwifTeck Full Cover heatsink.

Use the Water Loop and throw the Artic Shroud and heatsinks in a box.

Pros: its not too bad to install just take it step by step...before idle aprox 50c and load was like 85c with jet fan going at like 75%..now idle low 30s and i ran 3dmark vantage didnt go past 46c....vram temps seem the same like 35 idle 65 load ..the instructions say put all the thermal paste on the gpu i didnt but even using just half still seems like alot of paste...i kinda wish i just painted on a thin layer like i usually do and i think prob temps be a lil bit better...also since was not room to do push pull fan system inside my case i mounted the pull fan outside the back of the case...

Cons: takes a while to install mainly because u must take your time when installing the lil heatsinks..make sure u wait atleast an hour before u install the main heatsink because u dont want the lil heatsinks falling off when u install the big one

Pros: The fan cools the ram and VR
The liquid cooler which is optimized for the graphics board 7970

Cons: The mounting kit is not coustomer friendly.
Complicated installation

Other Thoughts: This cooler did a Brilliant job. I do a lot of research to choose a cooling fan to replace the stock cooler come with sapphire AMD HD 7970. Finally, I order this one. I am not sure how does it work. But I just am curious the water block with a cooling fan. Its instruction is clear. However, it take me around 6 hours to mount it on my board. Regardless of the installation issue i still give this card 5 stars especially. As for temps this cooler went far beyond my expectations. My idle temps didn’t not change much since they were already low (35-40C) on stock, I am getting about 32-35*C on this cooler. My old cooler would also get some high temps of 70-80*C now that I have this cooler my temps have not succeeded 60C i usually sit around 50-55C with my gpu at full load. This is an incredible difference. As for noise levels this card is no disappointment, While the fans are at 85%, you cannot hear much noise at all from the cooler. I’m sure most of you have coolers that make a high pitched annoying sound once the RPM go up but not this one. I would highly recommend this cooler to anybody looking to improve idle and load temps on their GPU and eliminate almost all of the noise coming from the card.