Page 15
The Verdict
Good God man ! this is nice stuff to own eh ? Sell a kidney and you could have this :) Okay sarcasm aside, first let's get the bad stuff out of the way, the setup I opted it does have a few quirks .. If you have stiff tubing (and I really do mean water-cooling tubing here!) or as in my case 1/2" tubing things can be a little difficult to install.
I quite honestly recommend that if you decide to go for these two cards in SLI that you have a mainboard with the two SLI PCI-Express slots as far away from each other as possible so you can work in that PC a little. The best mainboard that can help you with that is an nFORCE 680I for Intel or 680A AMD mainboard.
Now hours after posting this review one of my editor's informed me of something, check this out:
It seems that there is a good solve for the tubing issue we mentioned earlier. There's no need for tubing that pinches. We did not receive the proper quick-install guide which explains clearly that the barbs on the danger-den cooling block are reversable, so that for SLI you could just run straight tubing from one block to the other... no nead for bending etc. See an example on the above photo. That's just great ... something that should really be explained on the BFG website though.
So if you decide to go for two in SLI then you have to seriously look at tubing size and space, but a better option for connecting tubing as we displayed today definitely is at hand. But also please do not forget other essentials, you need a really kickass PC to be able to get two of these beasts at work. You'll need at minimum a Core 2 Duo E6600 processor or AMD equivalent to start with, you need (preferably) the nFORCE 680i nForce mainboard, you'll need the hefty power supply that can feed enough current into the system, the casing needs to be able to fit everything; and obviously you'll need a water-cooling solution to connect the BFG cards to. That by itself is a stack load of money. Which brings me to the pricing .. one card will set you down roughly 750 to 800 USD, so if you plan SLI .. dang .. you better start saving dude !Now if we compare the water cooled version with the regular fan cooled version then we'll see that overclocking wise there hardly is a difference. Granted, you'll have way better temps though. Also (and I found this to be a little surprising) the water-cooled edition does not come even slightly (pre) overclocked. But mark my words when I say .. BFG will do pre-overclocked cards soon as well. I have a 6th sense for these things (thanks for that info Graham ;).
So for now .. the most positive key features remaining for water-cooling are sound versus performance versus temperatures .. but likely the brag factor, the x-factor, the pimp stuff, the bling edition PC .. ehm you name it, is what it is really all about.
I really do believe that the that 'brag' factor is what it is all about. Hey, if you can choose between a Mazda and a Ferrari .. you'd choose the Ferrari. That's my point. So if you do this right, get the UV reflective coolant, some black lighting in the PC as we have shown you today .. then this is really cool stuff to do and own. I mean compare it with the cars from fast and the furious, yet this is the fast and the chilled.
Realistically speaking though the price however will hardly justify that uberlasting cool factor. Very few will be able to build such a rig purely based on the sheer amount of cash that you will need to do so. And is that much money really worth playing games ? But hey .. in the end that's your prerogative and your decision to make. If we look at a single water-cooled 8800 then that's where the product is really attractive. It's relatively easy to setup, will fit in any compatible mainboard, will offer you excellent cooling with seriously nice overclocking potential it's (and I hate using this word) l33t stuff to own.
Generally speaking about single card performance, any 8800 GTX obviously will eat anything you throw at it and then shout dude is that all? Framerates are flying which means you can enable heaps of eye candy. You start playing your games with a monitor that supports 1600x1200 and then enable 4xAA and 16xAF. I have been playing Prey for a while at a resolution of 2560x1600 (and that's 500% more pixels over 1024x768!) at 53 frames per second with every possible setting in the game set to HIGH. So I enabled 16xAA and at that same resolution I was still playing with an average of 34 FPS. If you are stuck at 1600x1200, 16xAA and 16xAF will get you 67 FPS and I'm talking about a single card here.
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So the one thing we just have not been able to test are DirectX 10 titles and that's really what this card is all about. I love the GeForce 8800 GTX on DX9, but I can only assume that it's going to rock at DX10. And until it's fully supported and games are actually being released I still owe you another review with DX10 titles.
For me personally the price is making purchasing this product hard to justify however I just can't deny how extremely cool this card is and I have to remind you of the fact that it'll offer you a tremendous gaming experience, that's a Guru3D guarantee. And another guarantee is that you'll receive a life-time warranty (USA) on the product and 10 years in the EU which gives it an exceptional edge over the competition for sure. This is all about pimping and pumping your rig, not cheap at all .. but fuck .. once you activate that black light how cool is your geat and how cool does that system look, that's like nuclear radiation glowing powering goop feeding your graphics card. What an intense gaming experience this is. If you do this right .. it's doesn't get much better.
Info: BFGtech
MSRP: 799 USD/EUR.
You can pick up this card for $779.99
