Both Guru3D and  Bit-Tech take a further look at the BFG GeForce 8800 GTX Water-cooled Edition. It is the first GeForce 8800-series card to move away from the reference cooler, so let's find out if it's worth the hefty price premium:

The GeForce 8800 GTX requires you to have a 450 Watt power supply unit at minimum. More importantly than just staring yourself blind on 450+ Watts, you need a PSU with a total 30A rating on the 12 Volts rails. If you have dough to spend and opt the guru path of righteousness by doubling up towards two cards in your system -> SLI, then you should end up with a 700 Watt or better PSU with a 40 AMPs 12 Volts (total) rail. And yes I agree, this is getting a little out of hand. As stated, we need to start thinking about mother nature a bit more, this increasing trend in power consumption can't continue. BTW if you tend to overclock with such an SLI setup, then I strongly recommend a KiloWatt PSU. Not that's it's needed in the sense of using up a 1000 Watts, but it's because these PSU's have a lot of ampere to spare on the important voltage distribution rails. That results is stability, which is very important while overclocking. We use the Enermax Galaxy 1kW PSU (review here) which allows high over clocks while maintaining stable voltage regulation.

Generally speaking about single card performance, any 8800 GTX obviously will eat anything you throw at it and then shout dude is that all? Framerates are flying which means you can enable heaps of eye candy. You start playing your games with a monitor that supports 1600x1200 and then enable 4xAA and 16xAF. I have been playing Prey for a while at a resolution of 2560x1600 (and that's 500% more pixels over 1024x768!) at 53 frames per second with every possible setting in the game set to HIGH. So I enabled 16xAA and at that same resolution I was still playing with an average of 34 FPS. If you are stuck at 1600x1200, 16xAA and 16xAF will get you 67 FPS and I'm talking about a single card here.

First things first, this card is definitely not for everyone - it's for a small niche of bleeding edge enthusiasts that are already watercooling their systems, or are considering making the jump with their next upgrade. The card fills a void in the market, where watercooling enthusiasts would typically void their warranty as soon as they remove the stock cooler from their video card in order to install their waterblock of choice. With BFGTech's watercooled GeForce 8800 GTX, there is no longer a need to void your video card's warranty if you're wanting to watercool, because the card comes fully warranted with a decent waterblock already installed. There is no doubting the card is not cheap at £528.74 inc. VAT, but if you're in the market for this kind of thing, you're going to be spending close to that already. If you were to go out and buy one of BFGTech's standard GeForce 8800 GTX's for around £400 inc. VAT (this week only at £387), along with Danger Den's waterblock that will cost you £91.64 inc. VAT, you'd lose your warranty. For the privilege of keeping a full lifetime warranty, BFG charges a £35 premium on its watercooled card.