Arctic Accelero Hybrid III – 140 Review

[section_title title=”Conclusion”]

Conclusion

Changing your GPU cooler is very likely to invalidate your warranty – whether you are going for another air cooler or a full on custom loop. As soon as you take the original cooler off the card you are probably going to be on your own. It’s not something to be taken lightly, especially if the card your modding costs in the region of £500, you really want to be sure that you are getting what you pay for. Once you have chosen to take that leap though and selected your new cooling product then you can look forward (with excitement or dread) to a bit of a project with fitting.

The Arctic Accelero Hybrid III is designed to make that project flow as smoothly as possible in order to give you the best outcome, but unlike me, you should probably make certain that you have the right version for your card before you start. Everyone makes mistakes I suppose, but it’s a bit embarrassing when you have to own up to one in public like this but yes, it’s my fault for not being clear about my GPU model. However, even with my botch job of fitting the air cooling component to the original heatsink and hoping for the best I have to say that I’m very pleased with the end result. There was a small dip in the average FPS during the benchmark but this was not noticeable in games, with Thief benchmark reporting over 90FPS in 1440p max settings and an average of 70+ fps.

Silence – or as close as possible – is a very important metric for me personally as my home computer is in the living room. There’s nothing more annoying to my partner than having to listen to high-performance fans creating a hurricane when she is trying to watch the TV and Arctic’s solution really fits in with my needs here. Anything louder than the bubbles in the fish tank has to go and I’m very happy that the Accelero Hybrid III passed that particular test with flying colours.

The other important metric is the cooling performance, and the Accelero Hybrid III really does its job well here too. 25% reduced heat and the option of adding a 2nd fan to the radiator for push-pull would get those temps tumbling even further. It’s stayed silent and cool when being stress tested and while gaming for a few hours at a time.

The last metric that is really important is price and whether that price represents value for money. An excellent item can be really expensive but still be worth the price but to judge whether this is the case here we have to look at what other examples are available. Perhaps the most popular solution is to put a standard CPU cooler like Corsair’s H80 onto the GPU. The cost would be fairly similar to the Hybrid III, so I guess popular opinion is that the price would be appropriate for this kind of cooling. Of course, I’d like to see it cheaper, but I wouldn’t rule out paying the full £84 especially having already tested it.

So there you have it; great cooling, straightforward assembly (usually), exceptional noise cancelling properties and an appropriate price. There’s not much more to say when it comes to summing up the product. Would I recommend Arctic’s Accelero Hybrid III – 140? Yes. Is it worthy of any of our awards? Yes again, our Performance Award is easily earned in this case as is our Quiet Award.

Thank you Arctic for sending me the Accelero Hybrid III for this review.