While waiting for NVIDIA's next wave of 65nm fabbed G90, G92 and G98 GPU's by the year end, some Taiwan graphics card vendors do try to squeeze the last bit of juice from the existing green goblin's king of the hill, the GeForce 8800 Ultra. Personally, if we already had an overclocked, well cooled GeForce 8800 GTX or Radeon HD 2900 XT, for that matter, we wouldn't bother with upgrading to the GeForce 8800 Ultra, as the few points performance difference will probably only be really reflected in benchmarks, and not measurably felt in real 3D applications. If you still got the money to burn for this purpose, we had a look at Leadtek's entry in this arena, the WinFast PX8800 Ultra Leviathan. - The Inquirer

Leadtek WinFast PX8800 Ultra Leviathan Card Review

A large box, stuffed with the usual drivers and mandatory 2 game bundle, contains the card and the cooling system. While the card's integrated water cooling block looks slim and stylish, with a greenish metal cover, it's just not slim enough to have a true single slot profile, a tiny less and it would. In that case, Leadtek could also have to cut the slot cover to one slot width, rather than the usual duel slot one. The user would gain an extra usable slot, and easier multi-card SLI fitting. Then comes the fixed connection to a large, L-shaped integrated pump, radiator and tank block with a 120 mm fan.

It is just large enough to require a pretty big full tower case to fit in, and you may need to lose one of your 120 mm exhaust fans to fit this baby in. And, of course, don't even think of SLI setup with two such units, not only the cards are a bit thick for this, but where to fit two Leviathans inside? The card runs at a factory set 684MHz GPU and 2322MHz memory speeds, a healthy overclock combined speed advantage over the standard GeForce 8800 Ultra factory speed. If you use nTune utility speed adjustment with standard drivers, it will refuse to accept any higher speed on either GPU or memory, though.

Yeah, the speed improvements are obvious. However, are they worth an additional $200 over the usual but slower GeForce 8800 Ultra, or roughly $130 above that same standard GeForce 8800 Ultra combined with Thermaltake NF4 customised GeForce 8800 water block for about the same performance or even higher if you combine that water block with a Peltier chilled or fridge chilled water cooling combo? The internal small cooling pump and radiator in Leviathan can never match those combos, or even the strength of, larger water cooling systems like, say, Corsair Nautilus 500 when used as a GPU cooler.

In summary, a great looking card, factory overclocked to the very top of G80 chip capability, but a kind of unfinished job. Slim it down to true single slot format, enable choice of high-end water cooling engines to feed the water block by selling the card without the Leviathan unit, and, well reduce the darn price. Then, it might become a possible choice for Quad SLI setup sitting on top of a, Dual Xeon, eight core skulltrail gaming mainboard.