The undisputed fastest GeForce 8800: ASUS AquaTank

ASUS EN8800GTX AquaTank

We have tested a large number of GeForce 8800GTS and GTX cards for our magazine recently in an effort to try and find the fastest GeForce card on the market today. A card we really wanted to test but did not arrive in our labs on time for this test is the EN8800GTX AquaTank by ASUS. This card has Watercooling as standard and ASUS claims that this model is faster than any other GeForce 8800 card in the shops. A bold statement that we just had to test for accuracy.

The EN8800GTX AquaTank is based on a standard GeForce 8800 GTX as we have already reviewed a few weeks ago. The original GeForce 8800 GTX review can be found here . ASUS has left the standard cooler for what it was and has implemented a Thermaltake watercooling solution on the card, and as you can see on the pictures the cooler on this card looks very similar to the Thermaltake TideWater, only with a different (Ghost Recon) decal. The biggest advantage to a solution like this is that you do not have to do anything yourself, it is a ready to go product that you can plug straight into your system. The pump, fans and radiator are all on a seperate unit that has to be placed in an empty PCI slot. The disadvantage is that both the card and the seperate unit take two slots, so when you use this card you will lose four PCI (-Express) slots. An SLI setup with two of these cards will be a virtual impossibility.

The GPU has a large copper heatsink, and ASUS has chosen to put a seperate heatsink on all the memory chips as well. As the memory is not cooled by the liquid cooler there is a fan present on the card itself. It is evident that ASUS has designed this card for extra performance and not to make it silent.

The extra module takes up two slots as stated before, and is fed through a normal molex connector from the PSU. On the top of the module is a switch that controls the fan speed between high and low. As there is a nother fan on the graphics card itself we did not really notice any difference in noise levels between the high or low setting. At the back of the module is a small cap where you can fill the reservoir, however as the card comes completely assembled, you will probably never need to refill the reservoir.