Date:
Thursday , January 18, 2007
Author:
Kyle Bennett
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BFGTech GeForce 8800 GTX Water Cooled Edition

We take a look at what BFGTech's 8800 GTX Water Cooled Edition delivers in terms of cooling performance and system security. Are 150 watt video cards forcing water cooling into the mainstream? If you are considering 8800 SLI you need to read this.

Introduction

As a warning to those of you expecting an [H] Enthusiast video card evaluation that is not what this is. Brent Justice will be delivering a GeForce 8800 SLI article very soon so stay tuned for that. Today we are going to focus on BFGTech's GeForce 8800 GTX Water Cooled Edition (WCE) and what exactly its benefits and disadvantages are. This will not be an uber-geeked-out look at 15 pages of pie charts and graphs, but rather an honest discussion about spending an extra $200+ on a water cooled video card and what it will deliver to you.

BFGTech GeForce 8800 GTX Water Cooled Edition

So what exactly is this product? The BFGTech 8800 GTX Water Cooled Edition video card is quite simply the stock version of the BFGTech GeForce 8800 GTX that has had the air cooled heatsink and fan unit removed to be replaced by a water cooled heatsink or “waterblock” as they are commonly called among enthusiasts.

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Danger Den’s Waterblock

The waterblock being used is not a no-name unit from China, but rather a hand crafted unit from right here in the United States that is being produced by Danger Den. Danger Den has come to enjoy a very large fan base worldwide as they have been in the industry many years. Don’t let their somewhat unimpressive website fool you. What they lack in site design, they very much make up for in water cooling engineering. Also we should note that Danger Den is selling the waterblock featured here direct as well, although you will likely have trouble finding stock as BFGTech’s WCE packages have been selling very well.

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For those of you interested, clicking on the image above will give you a full view of what goes on inside the waterblock as well as what the mating surface looks like. The mating surface comes into contact with the GPU as well as the RAM modules on the video card.

The BFGTech 8800 GTX WCE Package

Do be aware that this package is NOT a full water cooling system or a self contained water cooled card as we have shown you in the past. The package contains the video card, the waterblock that has been pre-installed on the video card, assorted hose barbs, clamps, an HDTV component cable, two 6-pin power adapters, two DVI to VGA adapters, and a driver disk.

We had some pictures to show you the specifics inside the packaging, but as of writing this several things have changed as to what exactly is in the box so it is best explained here.

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You still get a free BFGTech T-shirt as well as a set of Teflon Slick Pads to adorn your mouse (which work great on a new Ratpadz XT), but a couple of inclusions have been made. After we took delivery of our kit back in early December we made a few suggestions that BFGTech has taken action on. The new packages should be reaching retailers as you are reading this. If you are already a water cooling expert or even somewhat experienced, odds are these changes will not impact you as they are more focused on “bullet proofing” kits for those system builders out there that may be very new to the water cooling scene.

BFGTech has told us they have also updated the supplied instructions so that they are much more clear and concise, but we have yet to see them.

Instead of you buying the WCE packages with a specific hose/tubing barb size in mind, the new packages will contain fittings for 1/4”, 3/8”, and 1/2” ID (inside diameter) tubing sizes as well contain an assortment of clamps that will work with several different tubing ODs (outside diameter). Also, the 3/8” and 1/2” barb configurations come with a stub nipple that will allow you to plumb directly from one card to the next if you are using SLI as will be shown on the following pages.