Today we get to play with something interesting, its ECS's new SLI water cooled setup, the ECS GeForce 9800 GTX+ Hydra version. And this is a package that contains two GeForce 9800 GTX+ graphics cards that are water cooled with an easy radiator setup is all set to blow you away. This means that this Hydra pack, is actually an SLI solution, that gives you two cards with the appropriate cooling to enjoy greater performance at low temps and noise. This is a special pack, since you are not just buying one card alone, but two which means you need to have an SLI capable mainboard to enjoy its power. So just keep that in mind, if else you will be investing in something useless. - t-break

ECS GeForce 9800 GTX+ Hydra Water Cooled Review

It's a dragon again, but this time with three heads that make up the front design on the huge box with features and details on the front, the sides and the back. Unfortunately the outside of the box appeared to be pretty worn out during the transportation to us. And the box is huge for a reason and all is revealed when we open it up. The contents seem to be packed neatly and pretty tight to avoid excessive movement and damage during shipment. This solution is equipped with the Thermaltake Big Water 760i water cooling set, to keep both card cool and provide the SLI operation with these two GeForce 9800 GTX+ video cards.

The card layout is similar to any GeForce 9800 GTX+ boards out there, but the unique feature is of course their Thermaltake GPU waterblock. The all copper waterblock can be clearly seen through the transparent plastic cover. Straight out of the block are a couple of pre-installed tubes. The voltage regulators itself has a set of smaller heatsinks to keep cool. The overall installation of the Thermaltake block on the card makes it enough to occupy two slots at the back. The strange thing is that it is a water cooling, but still a fan is included giving extra airflow to keep surrounding components cool such as the different regulators.

It's apparent that the performance is the same as is it with the air cooled cards but it does fare better in some games with the new drivers. The features and the cooling solution is perfect for water cooling beginners as far as installation is concerned as it takes no more than five minutes to get everything up. We did try to overclock the card to compare it with the Zotac GeForce 9800 GTX Zone edition clocks and cooling. We managed to achieve 860MHz on the core which was higher than the Zotac's 850MHz on top of which the temps were 10°C lower than the Zotac card. There was no change between stock and overclocking.