Arctic's Accelero Twin Turbo III Works Well For Polaris GPU Cooling

Back in December I wrote about passively cooling a Radeon RX 480 by means of the after-market Accelero S3 passive cooler. That passive GPU cooler worked well but under demanding loads did get a bit hot, but what I came to realize after buying that cooler is the height requirements exceeded that of a 4U rackmount chassis... So recently I decided to switch to using the Arctic Cooling Accelero Twin Turbo III.

The Arctic Accelero Twin Turbo III isn't a brand new GPU heatsink model or anything along those lines, but in recent having picked it up in order to get this Radeon RX 480 fitting back within a 4U chassis, I just wanted to pass along some basic thoughts on it and some performance data for those that may be interested.

This GPU cooler is designed to work with graphics cards from both NVIDIA and AMD up to a 250 Watt TDP, including the Radeon RX 480 and GeForce GTX 1060/1070/1080.

This after-market VGA cooler has dual 92mm PWM-controlled fans and a backside cooler that's nearly identical to the one found on the passive Accelero S3.

This cooler has five copper heatpipes leading to the aluminum fins.

The mounting bracket is designed to easily fit a range of graphics cards. It's quite similar to the Accelero S3 so was fairly quick and trivial switching out the Accelero S3... It was a very easy process for this originally reference model RX 480.

An included adapter allows running the fans at either the straight 12V or lower 7V if you prefer a quieter system. But in my testing with the RX 480 so far, the fans have been very quiet and no complaints --- you'd likely hear coil whine over the top of these dual 92mm fans.

I ran some benchmarks while the Phoronix Test Suite was monitoring the GPU temperature reported for the RX 480 Polaris GPU.

Idling the Twin Turbo III heatsink on the RX 480 yielded a temperature of just 24 degrees when running at 12V or 26°C when the fans were at 7V, well below the 32°C of the passive heatsink.

Under load this Twin Turbo 3 heatsink does a much more impressive job... The numbers basically speak for themselves but even when running at the 7 Volts on the fans, the average temperature was 47 degrees with a peak of 63 degrees, well below the passively cooled heatsink and I believe even below the original reference cooler on this RX 480 "Polaris" graphics card.

Overall, I am very happy with the Arctic Accelero Twin Turbo III as it cools very well, is very quiet, and fits within the 4U height requirement for those running discrete GPUs in rackmount enclosures. This after-market graphics card cooler can be found from the likes of NewEgg for about $45 USD.