As a company, Arctic Cooling needs no introduction. They are the dominant force in third party GPU cooling, and currently creating a sizable impact in the CPU cooling market too with products such as the stupidly cheap Freezer 64 Pro. If you’re on the hunt for a high performance cooler for your swanky new video card you should not ignore Arctic Cooling.

Arctic Cooling are currently refreshing there high-end GPU coolers and the first to arrive are the Accelero X1 and X2. The X1 has been designed to fit the 7800 GT or GTX, including the GTX 512MB, while the X2 is for (you guessed it) the X1800 and X1900 range from ATI.

It’s not hard to find people who’d assume that Arctic Cooling’s NV Silencer range were already the performance leaders in GPU cooling, mainly because this is pretty much true. But this hasn’t stopped the folks at Arctic Cooling from bringing us some revamped coolers to drool over. The X1 and X2 are drastically different from the NV silencer range that ruled the earth before it. They have introduced heat pipe technology into the equation – a first for GPU cooling. Arctic Cooling claims this improves the cooling efficiency over the NV silencer range. The specifications for both are the following:

On paper they look impressive with there seriously low noise levels combined with high performance, but there are some questions that need answering. The airflow no longer travels outside of the PC case it’s installed in. Instead, the airflow blows directly onto the motherboard. This may or may not be a problem and it’s something we will try to address with this review.

I’m going to take a look at both the X1 and X2 and test them on a 7800 GT (X1) and X1800 XT (X2), respectively. I’ll test them at different fan speeds to get a solid idea of what you can expect from them under all possible circumstances…