Page 13 - Conclusion

The Verdict

Wowzers .. this surely is nice stuff to own. But I'm going to need to convince you guys why to opt it I guess. Ehm, 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.

A water-cooled edition of your graphics card does have a lot of practical positives, it's way more silent than traditional cooling, way more effective and thus you can overclock better and as mentioned above, the aesthetics are very pleasing. The downside, it's bloody expensive and only applies for a very small selection of guru's. It's the guys in our forums that carry labels/titles like "Ancient Guru".

So if you do this, please do it right, get the UV reflective coolant, some black (UV) lighting in the PC as that was what I wanted to show you today. Unfortunately I ran out of UV reflective coolant, so the tubing is looking a bit more dull then normal. Still .. it does look lovely.

Realistically speaking though, the price hardly justifies that uberlasting cool factor. The product is priced roughly 50-100 USD higher as a reference 8800 GTS 512MB but does perform nearly as well as that card, we're talking a couple of frames per second here and there. But if you have the luxery of water-cooling and need a good card, then this one would be my choice by far. But very few will be able to build a rig purely based on the sheer amount of cash that you will need to drop into the system. The card alone with water-block is expensive, yet you also need to have the rest of the water-cooling goodness installed. If you do it right, it'll cost you a pretty penny for sure.

Well .. in the end that's your prerogative and your decision to make. This BFG GeForce 8800 GTS OC2 ThermoIntelligent Water Cooled product is really attractive though. 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 though I hate using this word, it's just l33t stuff to own.

You roughly get equal to close 8800 GTS 512MB performance, yet slightly faster. If you overclock it a little further you'll push it to GTX performance, and that does not suck my kind Sir. By releasing the 8800 GT & GTS NVIDIA made a pretty clever move, you will get the raw horsepower to play your DX9 titles as you want to. Yeah, I'm leaving DX10 out equation here though, because for me personally this year's biggest disappointment was to find out how incredibly hard it is for current DX10 class graphics cards to render actual DX10 games, it's pretty horrendous.

But hey DX9 still kicks ass, and with the BFG 8800 GTS 512MB OC2 WC ThermoIntelligence series you are bound to have a lot of fun. For me personally the price is making purchasing this normally value 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 really nice gaming experience, that's a Guru3D guarantee.

A second and very important 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 fook [Ed - yeesh] .. once you activate that PC you'll notice how cool a setup like this is. The temps are just awesome and so is the water-block that's cooling the card. Dare I use the SLI word here ? Hey, if you do this right .. it's doesn't get much better than this.

BFG GeForce 8800 GTS OC2 Water Cooled EditionInfo: BFGtech
MSRP: $529.99

** Update - BFG has reconfigured it's price after we wrote our conclusion. Initially we where told the price would hover arround 400 USD. BFG however now have set the price at an amazing 529.99 USD which in our opinion is just too high. You can purchase a standard 8800 GTS 512MB for 330 USD, a waterblock can not be worth an extra 200 USD.

We stripped away the editor's choice, it's still a lovely product yet that sales price is absurd.

Thanks go out to funkmaster G for supplying us this product.