NVIDIA and AMD's high-end GPUs are transistor-heavy and, under full load, chew through around 200W of power, per card. That's why special attention has to be paid to cooling and, really, the reason why most partners opt to run with the twin-slot reference HSF designs.

ARCTIC COOLING is preparing to launch a new aftermarket cooler that will, it says, outperform the generally excellent reference models. Take a look for yourself.

The aptly-named Accelero Extreme features three 80mm fans, five heatpipes and an aluminium heatsink with 107 fins. Big stats!

[advert]The design is such that it will fit both the GeForce 8800 series and Radeon HD 2900 XT.

The Accelero Extreme will also concurrently cool the memory chips and voltage regulators. Further, it'll fit into the regular footprint taken by reference coolers, so no problems in adding two and using them in SLI or CrossFire.

ARCTIC COOLING reckons it will be on sale in the next couple of months. It will be interesting to see how the design changes, if at all, from the prototype shown at Computex. As usual, no word on pricing.

AC has enjoyed decent success with its passive Accelero S1M heatsink, as found, for example, on Inno3D's iChiLL GeForce 7950GT card.

Building upon the design, ARCTIC COOLING is releasing the Accelero S1 with optional Turbo Module (also available separately). It uses two slow-spinning 80mm fans to increase thermal performance. The Turbo Module obviously inhibits the S1/S2 from being totally passive designs but may well prove to be a good choice for those looking to overclock - the underlying heatsink has masses of heat dissipation already.