EVGA's 9800 GX2 Black Pearl Becomes Official

This is one for the enthusiasts, mainly for those who remember EVGA's Black Pearl, the graphic card meant for hardcore gaming. It seems that the graphic card manufacturer has not forgotten its enthusiast customers and has decided to release a "Black Pearl" version of the current NVIDIA flagship GPU. Although the card is not officially dubbed Black Pearl, it pretty much uses the same concept, namely high performance with a liquid cooling solution.

What the manufacturer didn't do with this card is to get it factory overclocked. By the looks of things, EVGA has decided to leave this to overclocking enthusiasts, who will now have a better cooling solution for their high performance graphic card. The card, which has been listed by various retail/e-tailers since April 1st, comes with a standard core speed of 600MHz and has been dubbed 9800 GX2 Hydro Copper 18 1024MB.

The name used for the card is rather intuitive, in that it indicates that it benefits from a liquid cooling solution and comes with no less than 1GB of GDDR3 memory. The water block has been placed between the two PCBs, making the card look rather naked without its plastic cover.

The technical specs, which make this card the fastest card available on the market (at least, until the GT200 arrives), include a memory frequency of 2000MHz and 256 stream processors running at 1512MHz. As most of you might have noticed, all tech specs are standard and also include NVIDIA's own technologies, like SLI support.

Enthusiast users looking to get their gaming rigs equipped with one of these liquid cooled monsters will have to pay at least $700, as displayed on the manufacturer's website. However, for that amount, they will be sure they get the best graphic solution - at least for a while.