Anyone own one care to comment?
the HD 5870 in my signature below uses the Twin Turbo II cooler, and i also have another one installed on a GTX 460 that's just collecting dust right now b/c i don't have room for it in any of my rigs. the TTII is, in a word, phenomenal. my machines are dedicated crunchers. the HD 5870 sees loads of ~85% and ~100% when running either 6 simultaneous POEM@Home tasks or 2 simultaneous Milkyway@Home tasks respectively, and shares its home with an HD 6950. both GPUs crunch 24/7, so cooling is even more important than it is for the gaming crowd. on top of all this, the rig is in my master bedroom, so not only must it have excellent cooling, but it must do so in virtual silence. some will say its impossible to have the best of both worlds (great cooling and minimal noise output), but i seem to have managed this with no less than 2 rigs, and possibly a third when i add a GPU to it. so even under this high-stress environment, the TTII keeps my HD 5870 at 60°C or less under its stressed loads, and does so w/ the fan speed at only 45%.
btw, the HD 6950 is cooled w/ an Xtreme PLUS II, a triple-fan Arctic Cooling product that's also in the Accelero lineup. the only downside i can think of is that, along w/ the GPU, it takes up 3 slots...so i can't put more than 2 GPU crunchers in any of my rigs unless i stick w/ GPUs w/ dual-slot coolers, and even then i'll have to start sacrificing either temperature or noise or both. but i digress...the point is that i'm extremely happy w/ Arctic Cooling products (well, at least 2 of them), and wouldn't hesitate to purchase another if i needed one.
Really interested in the sound aspect.
as i mentioned above, under the constant 24/7 heavy stress that my HD 5870 sees, the TTII keeps it at or below 60°C at only 45% fan speed...and if it weren't sharing real estate w/ a factory overclocked HD 6950 (Sapphire Toxic), the fan could probably maintain the same or similar temps at 30%-35% fan speed. not that it matters though - at 45% fan speed, the TTII is virtually silent. my CPU cooler, PSU, and case fans are all extremely silent. the case fans are large enough/numerous enough that low-RPMs are enough to keep things cool, and still keep things more or less silent. i understand that "noise level" is subjective, but to put things into perspective, i'm a noise nut, and go to great lengths to keep my machine as near to silent as possible.
Not 100% certain but that section missing fins is where the 6pin power connectors are located...
no, the power connecters are located at the opposite corner in that picture (top left). though i'm not sure it has anything to do with the DVI connectors either as KingFatty mentioned. i took a close-up picture of it on the GTX 460 that's just sitting around, and it appears to just be part of the heatsink design. in any case, you can see that there's a good 1/4" gap between the back of the side-by-side DVI connectors and the TTII's plastic fan shroud, which would appear to be enough room for another row of DVI port contacts to snake their way down to the PCB, had this particular GPU come w/ stacked dual DVI ports instead:
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