Arctic Accelero Hybrid III-140 GPU Cooler Review

Methodology and reasoning

To test the Accelero Hybrid III-140, I wanted to look at two main factors – core temperature and GPU clock speed. The first is obvious – we are hoping the cooler will significantly lower the core temperature of the GPU, when compared to the stock cooler. However, that is not the complete picture, as thanks to GPU Boost 3.0 technology, Nvidia's Pascal graphics cards dynamically adjust their clock speed based on their temperature target and power limit. As such, I also wanted to look at how, if at all, the Accelero Hybrid III-140 helps the GTX 1080 keep its clock speed high.

So, here's what I did:

• First, I took the Founders Edition GTX 1080 (with its stock cooler) and ran the 3DMark Fire Strike stress test for 20 runs. At the end, I noted the max core temperature, as well as both the maximum core frequency achieved, and the frequency at which the GPU ‘settled' after dynamically adjusting.
• After that, I ran the same test but with the Accelero Hybrid III-140 installed, allowing us to directly compare the results. Nothing else changed between tests, so each result is directly comparable.

Test hardware

To run these tests, I used the following hardware:

• AMD FX-8370 CPU
• Cooler Master Hyper 212 LED cooler
• AsRock 990FX Extreme9 motherboard
• 8GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3-2400 RAM
• Corsair RM750x PSU
• Toshiba OCZ Trion 150 SSD

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