Ever since the GeForce 8800 GT and GTS series have been released everyone was flabbergasted by two things, the tremendous amount of bang for bucks and more unfortunate the heat the card creates. It's pretty safe to say that the GeForce 8800 GT and GTS with reference coolers run hot, very hot as we've seen temps over 90°C when fully utilized. The cards can have it though, so don't be worried about it. It however is not sexy. See sexy is when a card will diverts from traditional cooling and utilize a more unconventional cooling method. BFG figured, let's go out with a bang this year. So they released the BFG GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB ThermoIntelligence Water Cooled video card. - Guru3D

BFG GeForce 8800 GTS OC2 Water Cool Card Review

Now this is a card that you need to hook into your existing water cooling setup, so cooling performance will vary per setup obviously. But no matter how you look at it, water cooling is probably the best and most effective cooling method for a graphics card. It doesn't stop there though, there are certain batches of cards that can overclock pretty darn well, combine that with an effective cooling method, and you are playing around with a golden nugget. The BFG GeForce 8800 GTS OC2 Water Cooled version is clocked at 700MHz at default with it's memory clocked at 1950MHz effective.

The new GTS 512MB cards are surely interesting for the eyes. We know we've seen the PCB before, yet the cooler is definitely new. It's based on the GTS design, yet the fan is angled slightly different, pushing more air over and closer to the GPU. The silicon powering that GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB is based on NVIDIA's newer 0.65nm silicon. Much like the GeForce 8800 GT you'd probably ask. So is this a respin product? And again we would answer yes and no, but not exactly. See, this GPU architecture is 95% the same as the good old G80 core yet with some exceptions and more energy efficient.

In the BFG box we'll find a reference based NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB yet with two distinct differences, this one has a water cooling block the size of a whale on it, and it's a pre-tested and qualified vanilla GeForce 8800 GTS sample. That means pre-qualified to run faster while remaining stable, and that is sexy. Obviously what you'll notice immediately is that the water cooling block that covers all the memory chips and GPU core. That block seems to originate from DangerDen, it's looking pretty cool for sure. And of course you need to connect it to your existing water cooling setup, or buy that as well.

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 users. Realistically speaking though, the price hardly justifies that uberlasting cool factor. The product is priced roughly $50-100 higher as a reference GeForce 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 waterblock 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.