AMD’s flagship HD6990: is silent air cooling possible?

1. Introduction2. Super High Res Gallery3. Performance Testing4. Closing Thoughts5. View All Pages

AMD's HD6990 is a powerhouse of a graphics card. Sadly the AMD development team felt that using a tiny, high spinning fan was a good idea, and the product has been marred with irritating noise emissions since it launched. Until AMD step up their game with a good ‘reference' cooling system, it comes down to third party companies to fix the situation.

The Arctic Cooling Accelero Twin Turbo 6990 has rectified the problem and should sell well between now and the New Year. It may cost $150, but if you can afford the HD6990 in the first place then there is a good possibility that this won't bother you too much.

Since our ‘world first' review of the Accelero Twin Turbo 6990 earlier this week our readers have been asking me if it was possible to improve the product even further. While I could have opted for a performance Delta Fan cooled solution to drop temperatures even further, we would be back at square one with high noise emissions.

I decided to use two of the Xigmatek XAF F1451/F1452 fans which cost around £15 each in the United Kingdom. I wasn't sure initially if the Accelero cooler could house such large fans normally used for chassis cooling, but as testing has shown it is possible to mount two 140mm fans without a problem. If we spent time we could create something more substantial (and more attractive) for the mounting system. That said, for the purposes of this article, it held in place just fine.

With this modified cooler, the HD6990 was idling at 30c, only 6c above room temperature and when gaming it was registering 58c … much better than the 84c+ from the reference cooler.

While we like the Arctic Cooling 120mm fans, there is certainly further room for improvement if you are willing to make a little effort in changing the fans and creating a custom mounting system. We lowered noise emissions to the limits of our testing equipment while improving the performance.

We love this modified HD6990, it is not only faster than any other graphics card in our labs, but it is now quieter.

Was it worth the time and effort? Let us know.

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