The installation process is quite easy. First you have to remove the standard cooler that comes with your video card, obviously. Then you need to remove all thermal paste that is currently applied on the GPU and also use a pencil eraser to clean the memory chips and the voltage regulator transistors. This step is very important, because otherwise the passive heatsinks won’t stick to the memory chips and transistors. Then you can go ahead and install the passive heatsinks, which can be done by simply peeling off the paper available on the bottom, positioning the heatsink on top of the component and applying pressure. Depending on your video card you may not use all heatsinks that come with the cooler.
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Figure 5: Our Radeon HD 4870 with the passive heatsinks installed.
After the passive heatsinks are installed, the next step is installing the cooler itself to the video card. The base of the cooler can be moved up and down if you see that after installing the cooler it will be on the same line as the PCI Express edge contacts or lower, what will prevent you from installing the video card on your motherboard. So before screwing the cooler to the video card, make sure that they will fit your system correctly. If not, adjust the base to a different position until you find the correct spot.
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Figure 6: Our Radeon HD 4870 with Accelero Twin Turbo cooler installed.
The cooler doesn’t touch the passive heatsinks, but they are located very close to the cooler’s heatsink. So the two fans indirectly cool down the memories and the voltage regulator circuit, too.
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Figure 7: Side view.
As mentioned, you have three options for the power cable. You can connect it on the original fan power socket located on the video card, you can connect it directly to the computer power supply at +7 V or you can connect it directly to the computer power supply at +12 V. We will test these three options.
The only big drawback from Accelero Twin Turbo is that your video card will take up three slots on your computer, not only two. This may prevent you from installing a second video card on your system. We will talk more about this on the conclusions.
Before going to our tests, let’s recap the main features from Accelero Twin Turbo.
