bit-tech News: ECS Hydra Watercooled 9800 GTX+ SLI pack

[news 28]

Hi all,

 

We have just published a review of the *ECS Hydra Watercooled 9800 GTX+

SLI pack*. If you could post a link on your site that would be very much

appreciated.

 

*Link:*

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2008/10/09/ecs-hydra-watercooled-9800-gtx-sli-pack/1

 

 

*Picture:*

http://images.bit-tech.net/content_images/2008/10/ecs-hydra-watercooled-9800-gtx-sli-pack/fp_img.jpg

 

 

*Quote:

*/We're sorry to say it, but the ECS 9800 GTX+ Hydra SLI kit is a bit of

a disappointment. The build quality of the GPU cooling and waterblocks

is probably the most galling of faults -- we almost couldn't believe it

when we saw the shoddily fitted waterblocks when we took the cards out

of the box, and the situation only got worse when the PWM coolers

literally fell apart once we'd started testing. The baffling inclusion

of the blue LED lit paddle fan adds to the list of flaws -- they have

absolutely no influence on card's operating temperatures and are so

woefully underpowered that they couldn't ever hope to keep the cards

cool on thier own in the case of a watercooling system failure. It's as

if ECS just wanted something to stick some blue LEDs onto so screwed a

load of useless plastic onto the cards.

 

And the problems don't stop at the card design. While the Thermaltake

Bigwater 760is was well put together and perfectly solid, it could do

with a bit of a rethink -- exhausting hot air straight down is baffling,

and the fact that it's exhausted into the case and not out of it isn't

going to help internal system temperatures one bit. It's also

frustratingly loud in comparison to the stock 9800 GTX+ cooler even with

the fan speed set to low, and when set to high it's intrusively noisy,

having been annoying the rest of the office with its irritatingly loud

drone for most of the week.

 

The final nail in the coffin of the instability and uncertainty you get

from SLI drivers. As we've seen with our Crysis DirectX 10 results, SLI

drivers are still far from perfect even for the post popular games, and

we'd still have to recommend a more expensive single core GPU than two

less expensive graphics cards in SLI or CrossFire. While some of the

benchmarks might look impressive, the performance improvement is rarely

close to 100 percent, and the instability and scaling problems just

aren't worth the hassle, let alone the extra investment involved.

 

In short, while SLI performs well in some situations, it can't rescue

the ECS Hydra 9800 GTX+ SLI pack from its more serious flaws. Poorly

built cards, running at stock speed that disintegrate under load are not

worthy of your money, no matter how bling bling the over engineered

cooling system is. If you really want to get into the world of

watercooled graphics cards, do it properly with a custom loop and not

with this half baked kit that's high on ideas, but desperately low on

execution./

*

 

*Cheers guys!

 

Tim Smalley

www.bit-tech.net