Retail packaging

Let's start off the review by taking a look at the Accelero S2's retail packaging.

A quick glimpse at the packaging may have you envisioning a heat sealed nightmare to get into it, but thankfully that isn't the case, with the plastic encasing the part proving to be nice and easy to open.  Within the plastic, we can see the Accelero S2 itself in all its glory, as well as the additional back plate to allow the cooler to vent hot air out of the case, and heat sinks for the graphics board's memory modules.

From the rear of the packaging, we can see the base of the cooler which sits atop the GPU core.  You can also see Arctic Cooling's performance claims for the S2 as far as temperature reductions go, and a list of the cooler's main features, including the Accelero's six year warranty.

Arctic Cooling Accelero S2 GPU cooler

Moving on to the cooler itself, we see that the Accelero S2 shares the not insubstantial dimensions of the S1 cooler - In fact, the size of the heat sink is identical, with only the number of heat pipes really differentiating the two boards.

The principle behind the Accelero S2 is simple enough - The cooler's two copper heat pipes draw heat away from the GPU core, where they are dissipated amongst the thirty-one aluminium fins on the heat sink.  From here, cool air from the case removes that heat, where it can be exhausted out of the back of the case thanks to the inclusion of a ventilated backplate for the second slot occupied by the cooler.  Also included with the S2 are eight RAM sinks, to attach to the board's memory modules, completing the passive cooling solution.

We can see the two copper heat sinks here, as well as the copper base (complete with thermal paste) used to make contact with the GPU core to pull that heat away.

Bundled with the main body of the Accelero S2 itself, we find a paper user manual, Arctic Cooling sticker, ventilated back plate, eight RAM heat sinks, and the final mounting brackets for the cooler itself.  Everything you need to install the cooler with the minimum of fuss, in other words.

Installation

If you've ever removed and refitted a graphics card cooler before, then (with the help of some reasonably concise instructions in the installation manual) fitting the Accelero S2 to your own board really shouldn't be an issue.  Our 'victim' for testing purposes here is a Radeon X1650 XT board, but there are only slight differences between attached this cooler to NVIDIA parts, all of which are outlined in the manual.

After removing the existing cooling solution, the first step is to fit the RAM sinks to each memory module, using the adhesive tape attached to each miniature heatsink.  Once that's done, you can line up the main body of the cooler itself with the GPU core, and screw it in carefully from the back of the board using the screws provided.

From there, it's simply a case of adding the final plastic brackets provided, clipping them to the heat sink and PCB of the graphics board to support it and hold it firmly in place.

Once the Accelero S2 is comfortably fitted, it's simply a case of screwing the provided back plate into the second slot occupied by the cooler, and then slotting in the graphics board as usual.  If you have a small chassis then you may want to grab a tape measure and check the dimensions before you buy the S2 however - As you can see, it only just squeezes into our test system on account of the height of the heat sink.