Last week we had Peltier cooling the GeForce 8800 world and this week, we go water cooling, and with a truly massive example at that. BFG tailor made a water block for the GeForce 8800 GTX cards. Its slim, sleek, water cooled GeForce 8800 GTX provides us with 1U overall thickness with good performance. The only problem is power. With this arrangement, cooled with a single water source, one goes, it all goes, especially if running the system on a hot day in Singapore. ASUS on the other hand took a different approach with its Extreme N8800 GTX AquaTank edition, by going for an all in one water cooling for the graphics card, which they lend from Thermaltake. - The Inquirer

ASUS Extreme N8800 GTX AquaTank Edition Preview

Its engineers took the standard card, replaced the basic cooling with a pretty hefty GPU water block with extra memory heat spreaders, then added dedicated fan to keep that cool. That all takes up close to a two slots in the motherboard. Then, you got two black tubes leading to a separate reservoir, pump, radiator and fan block, full of copper and green liquid, which by itself takes another slot and more or so. Which effectively means another two slot spaces. The kit itself, knocked together by Thermaltake, is physically the largest among all the graphics cards we have ever seen.

So, in total, you got to spare nearly four slots for a single graphics card. Even before thinking of SLI operation, we barely had space for a sound card in there. Of course, the card supports SLI technology, but simply, unless you have a casing with, like ten slots of space provided, or stack things on top of each other using the fourth spatial dimension, you can forget about SLI in this case. The laws of physics stand in your way. Oh yes, not to forget, besides the usual twin 6-pin power connectors for the GPU, both the extra GPU fan and the water block have their own added 4-pin hard disk type power connectors.

What about its performance numbers? Do they justify the extra power and case space required? Well the ASUS is set at 630MHz core clock, and 2060MHz memory speed effective. Oh, surprise! At the identical GPU and memory clock rates and settings, ASUS had slightly faster Futeuremark numbers compared to the month older Calibre, across several runs. Since it is the same PCB, either ASUS used some kind of newer, improved G80 stepping, or maybe the memory chips used were with a lower latency. Anyone's got a better explanation? More importantly, I could overclock the card somewhat more.

Noise wise, this humongous setup was practically silent. There must be some use for the bucket of green water and a brick of copper fins, after all. In summary, it is the fastest and definitely, bulkiest single card setup I know of, excellent for those who want the ultimate without going to for an SLI upgrade. Now, why not power up that reservoir a bit more, and provide dual pipe sets to connect two GPU's? Then we could talk about that SLI again, maybe with the GeForce 8900 GTX accelerator?