Pre-overclocked graphics cards are nothing new but overclocked and water cooled cards are something of a rarity. MSI have seen a niche in the market they wish to explore with the OC HydroGen model based on the GeForce GTX 280. Despite MSI overclocking the GeForce GTX 280 to 700MHz, a 10°C temperature drop is claimed over the stock clocked 602MHz strong GeForce GTX 280. This makes the OC HydroGen the fastest pre-overclocked GeForce GTX 280 available and perhaps more importantly, faster than the recently checked out GeForce GTX 285. This is achieved by using a full cover water block which cools all the main components while remaining just single PCI thickness. - Overclock3D

MSI GeForce GTX 280 HydroGen Edition Card Review

Obviously adding a copper full cover water block is not cheap and thus the price of $499 is $75 more expensive than the cheapest GeForce GTX 285 we could find. However, if full out performance is what you want and you already have a water cooled system then serious consideration should be given to this board. MSI have increased both the memory and shader frequencies to better feed the core. With a whopping 100MHz overclock on the core itself, we expect great things from the HydroGen and it will be interesting to see if the extra 50MHz is enough to dethrone the newer GeForce GTX 285 graphics card.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the packaging is the size of the box being almost twice the length of the card itself. The front of the package displays the main features of the graphics card such as 1GB memory, 3-way SLI and PhysX capabilities. Strangely the front of the package does not give any indication that this is a water cooled card. The rear of the package goes into the finer points of the cards features as well as the basic system requirement for running the GeForce GTX 280. It isn't until we flip the lid of the outer sleeve that the main feature of this unique GeForce GTX 280 accelerator is really indicated.

Now for our overclocking tests we used RivaTuner to overclock the card which is perhaps the most commonly used generic utility to overclock GPU's at a driver level. Since the card was already overclocked past the GeForce GTX 280 stock clock speed of 602MHz to a record 700MHz, and we did not expect the card to perform much higher than this given that most GeForce GTX 280's that have passed through our hands reached a maximum of 730MHz. We were wrong, the overclocking performance of this Hydrogen version exceeded our expectations reaching a maximum 792MHz on the core and we think it could even go higher.

This we feel was a limitation of voltage rather than temperature and we have no doubts that given extra voltage, the card could easily exceed 800MHz. We left the shaders linked which also reached an astonishing 1584MHz. Couple this with a memory overclock of a further 400MHz past the default 2300MHz, and this is by far the fastest GTX we have ever come across. The MSI GeForce 280 GTX OC Hydrogen certainly validated its high price tag. Taking into consideration the cost of the lush full cover copper block and the fact that this is an extremely high, pre-overclocked package and it starts to work out at a competitive price point.

The power draw of the card will be slightly less due to there being no fan but consideration needs to be made to the added power requirements of a water cooling loop. If we had to find some fault it would be the price. For the money you could buy the newer GeForce GTX 285 and add your own block but this could invalidate your warranty. There is also the risk of damaging the board yourself when fitting an aftermarket water block but at this end of the market, speed is everything and speed usually goes hand in hand with temperatures so this is something people are willing to risk. The MSI card eradicates this risk.

As stated, the flagship NVIDIA card would offer more performance but then noise becomes an issue, so while this GeForce GTX 280 OC HydroGen does at first glance appear expensive, but it strikes a very even balance and could form an attractive proposition to the shrewd water cooling performance junkie.