BFG First With Water-Cooled NVIDIA GTX 295 GPU
At the back end of last month, we heard a juicy rumor that seemed,
well, perfectly good enough to be true. Sure enough, the whispers of a
water-cooled GTX 295 have led to a real, honest-to-goodness product,
though it's not being produced by either of the vendors we expected.
Instead, it's being delivered by GPU mainstay BFG Technologies.
The
new card easily boasts one of the longest product names we've seen to
date. So long, in fact, that we'll just put it out there for you to
wrap your mind around: BFG GeForce GTX 295 H2O graphics card with
ThermoIntelligence Water Cooling Solution. Got all that? Underneath
all the fancy wording is a standard BFG GeForce 295 dual GPU graphics
card which has been supplemented with a highly efficient, thermally
advanced copper water block co-developed with the experts at Danger
Den, which is hailed as a "totally silent cooling solution for
customers who have an existing water cooling system set up." More
specifically, the BFG ThermoIntelligence water block delivers an
exceptional 44°C lower GPU operating temperature than with air cooling,
and it chills every single heat generating point on the card -- GPU,
RAM, voltage regulators, and I/O chip.

John Malley, senior
director of marketing for BFG Technologies, had this to say about the
new product: "Since the GeForce GTX 295 is essentially two graphics
cards and two GPUs sandwiched together, developing this
ThermoIntelligence water block to work with the GeForce GTX 295 board
was more complex than most. Our pre-assembled solution is attractive to
those enthusiasts looking for top of the line performance without the
risk of building it themselves, and that is also covered by our famous
lifetime warranty. Customers purchasing this unit can rest assured that
they’ll have the best built water block on the fastest single graphics
card on the planet."
As for specifications, the card contains
1.8GB of GDDR3 memory, a 576MHz core clock speed, a 142MHz shader clock
speed, a 1998MHz memory date rate and 480 combined processing cores. If
you're eager to slap one of these into your rig, you can find it
available for shipment starting tomorrow in North America and Europe,
though no price is mentioned. For those needing additional performance
right out of the box, you should probably hold off for the factory
overclocked version, which is on track for a March 2009 release.