The GeForce 9800 GTX+ is something of a forgotten commodity in the current generation of graphics cards. Just hanger on from the heady days of G92, when NVIDIA ruled the roost and GeForce 8800 GT's roamed LAN parties in great graphics rendering herds. Sadly for NVIDIA at least, those days have now passed, with the RV770 powered family of graphics cards from AMD taking their place as the dominant GPU's on the market. And with the release of the Radeon HD 4870 1GB version, it's getting more and more difficult to justify throwing your lot in with team green. When we first checked the GeForce 9800 GTX+ card, we found it pretty disappointing in comparison to the Radeon HD 4850. - Bit-Tech

ECS GeForce 9800 GTX+ Hydra Cooling Pack Review

Outperformed in the majority of games and around $30 to $50 more expensive than the Radeon HD 4850, it was the stereotypical. And not especially terrible in either performance or value, but utterly eclipsed by the brilliance of the Radeon HD 4850 card. The only thing it really had going for it was the launch of PhysX acceleration, which we're disappointed to see has yet to make it into any triple-A game releases. Somehow a real shame considering the potential of such a large installed user base with CUDA enabled GPU's. However while we've focussed only on single GPU performance, we've yet to take SLI setups into our findings.

Could the GeForce 9800 GTX+ finally prove its worth in a multi-GPU setting? Or will it be another case of NVIDIA's card being outperformed by the competition? ECS will certainly be hoping for the latter, with its GeForce 9800 GTX+ Hydra SLI pack, a complete SLI solution in a box. However these are by no means normal GeForce 9800 GTX+ cards, they are watercooled and the whiney dual slot NVIDIA stock cooler has been replaced with a pre-fitted Thermaltake Bigwater 760is. All you will need to do is connect the appropriate hoses to the pre-fitted copper GPU waterblocks, fill the reservoir, plug it in and you are ready to enjoy.

Sadly though, other than the pimped out cooling solution these cards still run at NVIDIA's pre-determined reference clock speeds for a GeForce 9800 GTX+ card. Bundle wise you certainly get a hell of a lot, the box for the kit is huge! Inside you'll find, along with the two GeForce 9800 GTX+ cards with their pre-fitted Thermaltake waterblocks and the Thermaltake Bigwater 760is water cooling system, a whole bevy of connectors and cables with everything you'd possibly need to get the setup running. On this aspect it's an excellent hardware bundle, and you even get a game to stretch the kit's graphical muscle too.

Just as a quick reminder, the stock GeForce 9800 GTX+ runs at 740MHz core. After a few hours of furious overclocking we'd surpassed the 800MHz core clock barrier and were still going, eventually topping out at 850MHz core, 2110MHz shader and 2360MHz effective on the memory. And this is an unquestionably impressive overclock, representing a core clock increase of just under fifteen percent. During our overclocking we also kept an eye on the core temperatures using RivaTuner and noticed that even at max overclock the GPU core never jumped over 50°C, indicating that we're being more limited by the core voltage.

We are sorry to say it, but the ECS GeForce 9800 GTX+ Hydra kit is a bit of a disappointment. The build quality of the GPU cooling and waterblocks is probably the most galling of faults. We almost couldn't believe it when we saw the shoddily fitted waterblocks when we took the cards out of the box. It's as if ECS just wanted something to stick some blue LED's onto so screwed a load of useless plastic onto the cards. And the problems don't stop at the card design. While the Thermaltake Bigwater 760is was well put together and perfectly solid, it could do with a bit of a rethink and certainly could be more effective.

It's also frustratingly loud in comparison to the stock GeForce 9800 GTX+ cooler even with the fan speed set to low, and when set to high it's intrusively noisy, having been annoying the rest of the office with its irritatingly loud drone for most of the week. The final nail in the coffin of the instability and uncertainty you get from SLI drivers. As we've seen with our DirectX 10 results, SLI drivers are still far from perfect even for the post popular games, and we'd still have to recommend a more expensive single core GPU than two less expensive graphics cards in SLI or CrossFire configuration, delivering better price to performance results.

In short, while SLI performs well in some situations, it can't rescue the ECS GeForce 9800 GTX+ Hydra pack from its more serious flaws. Poorly built cards, running at stock speed that disintegrate under load are not worthy of your money, no matter how bling bling the over engineered cooling system is. If you really want to get into the world of water cooled graphics cards, do it properly with a custom loop and not with this half baked kit that's high on ideas, but as shown desperately low on execution.