Retail Packaging:

   The retail packaging for the Arctic Cooling Accelero X1 is adequate, but not spectacular. It does however come with a nice cover for rear mounted memory on some video cards.

   Also inside the packaging you will receive an Arctic Cooling sticker, 8 pieces of thermal pads for video card memory, and a small bag containing tiny screws for installation to replace your stock heatsink screws.

   That funny looking clear (and crooked) cover you see over the pre-applied thermal pad on the copper section is just that, a protective cover for the thermal paste. It comes off easily with a pull before installation.

   The included one page instruction sheet was adequate for installation. I just browsed the pictures real quick before getting started, as most of you will do, and I had no problems with installation. More on that later.

   Upon removing the Accelero X1 cooler from the package, the first thing you notice is the bulk and not the weight surprisingly. There's plenty of copper and aluminum on this product, but there's even more plastic. The bulk of the unit's size is plastic and therefore pretty light in weight.

Inside the Accelero:

   Below I decided to strip down one of my Accelero's to give you an inside-out view of what you'll receive and what exactly makes this thing tick.

   You can see the big plastic body I referred to earlier as I remove it from the heatpipe/heatsink unit. It comes off easily with a few screws which would make it nice and easy for cleaning the fan should it start collecting too much dust or debris, however, you'll have to remove the entire cooler from the card since the screws are on the back! doh!

   The one plus to that scenario is it's probably not real likely that the fan will collect much dust since it's not a typical fan. It's more of a turbine fan where there is no spaces in between the blades like a normal fan. There is solid plastic throughout as you can see in the picture.

The Victim:

    If you're a long time reader of VH, and more specifically my reviews (which I hope you are!), by now you should know that I like to show you more than you're expecting to see. I have no hesitation in showing you related pictures, steps, and products during the course of my review process for a particular product.

   So what does that mean exactly? Well it means I'm not only going to show you the installation of this cooler on a clean and stripped down 7800GT, but I'm also going to show you the deconstruction of the original cooler for my XFX 7800GT before hand. Why? Because you just HAVE to see this...

   After looking at the above pictures, do you see why I just had to show you them? For those of you not following along very well, the examples you see above is exactly what I was stricken with when I removed the stock Nvidia cooler that came on my "Factory overclocked" XFX 7800GT video card. Let's just say it's a good thing I was replacing it...

   You can see that one section of the video cards memory was blocking almost 1/3 of the fans cooling ability and when you're talking about a tiny fan as it is, that's not good.

   The thermal pads were very thin but at least they were placed correctly on the ram. I'm sure Nvidia did lots of testing to make sure the cooler is adequate for cooling the GPU and RAM, however it's certainly nothing to write home about. I'm guessing it's the cheapest possible way to accomplish the task and keep the smallest package possible. It's still shocking to look at and if your 7800GT GPU temps are rather high with your card, just keep these images in mind.

   Enough with the old, let's get on to the new...