Today, our lab plays host to what will soon reveal to be the fastest graphics card around. It is made by EVGA, a company well famous for overclocked models of NVIDIA based graphics cards and highly respected for its contributions to the overclocking business. The board is named GeForce GTX 295 HydroCopper, and uses water cooling. Now the clocks are nothing short of impressive, with 720MHz core, 1548MHz shaders and 2160MHz effective memory speeds. If you compare this to reference clocks you will realize this kind of overclock is something only EVGA will dare to do. And once again we see that water cooling can easily lift the bar to the next level, and way beyond if we rely on this model. - FudZilla

EVGA e-GeForce GTX 295 HydroCopper Card Review

The video card also comes with EVGA's backplate, a special plate that can be mounted on standard air cooled GeForce GTX 295 cards and EVGA currently sells it for $20. This plate helps with heat dissipation on the back of the card, and it will lower GPU temperatures by a couple of degrees in best case scenarios. Mounting the backplate however isn't mandatory but we must admit that the card looks much better with it on. Their water block is sandwiched between the two PCB's, on the spot where the reference card's cooler was located. That means getting rid of air cooling, and stick in some water cooling solution.

We expected the board to be heavier due to the large HydroCopper block, but it weighs about the same as the reference card. The block is made of aluminum and copper, and copper is used where the cooler meets the GPU's. Mounting is nothing out of the ordinary, all you need to do is connect the pipes to the fittings. The results we've seen today were almost unimaginable a few months ago, but EVGA made this a reality with its GeForce GTX 295 HydroCopper graphics card. Unlike the reference board with its 576MHz core, EVGA's HydroCopper runs at 720MHz core and 2160MHz effective memory clocks.

The card's name shows that the reference cooling has been replaced with water cooling. Although the video card is overclocked to 720MHz, the temperatures are cooler than reference, and hit 57°C under a workload and 35°C in idle mode. Also, we could have easily pushed the board to 745MHz, but we decided against it since it has already rightfully claimed its throne. This is the first card that can get you to sixty frames at Far Cry 2 at the ultra widescreen resolution with anti-aliasing enabled. That alone is one hell of a result as also Crysis does fare very well with this HydroCopper version featuring increased clock speeds.

However, don't expect this board to be cheap as it will set you back more than $700, but note that the GeForce GTX 280 was introduced at a similar price point, and has proven to be a nice seller. One thing is for certain, the e-GeForce GTX 295 HydroCopper is the fastest card money can currently buy, and to say that this card is just fast would be a severe understatement. Since this is undoubtfully the fastest card, we've ever tried, it was an easy decision to recommend it.