14 DAY TRIAL // Though the GF100 managed to reclaim the crown of the fastest GPU on the market, it has a significant disadvantage, in that it produces a very high amount of heat. This drawback is what limits its overclocking headroom and gives the reference cooler a hard time. As such, it was hardly surprising to see several special cooling solutions for the GTX 470 and GTX 480 emerge. Unfortunately, like the cards themselves, the special waterblocks were not immediately available for purchase, but this seems likely to change soon, now that a particular EVGA model is showing signs of life.
EVGA doesn't exactly plan on selling the Hydro Copper waterblock by itself, but on special versions of the GeForce GTX 470 and GTX 480. As they are capable of operating at lower temperatures, these graphics-card models will come with the benefit of a performance boost and reliability, compared with the reference models.
Sadly, the higher end GTX 480 has not yet been listed, which means that hard-core gamers and enthusiasts will have to wait for a while longer. On the other hand, those that find the capabilities of the GTX 470 sufficient will be pleased to hear that the Hydro Copper version of the GTX 470 has been listed.
The water-cooled GTX 470 comes with clocks of 650MHz for the graphics processing unit, of 1,300MHz for the shaders and of 3,402MHz for the 1,280MB GDDR5. As a comparison, the stock version has GPU/shader/VRAM clocks of 607/1,215/3,348MHz. Other than this, the GeForce GTX 470 Hydro Copper FTW remains similar to the original, with 448 CUDA cores, a memory interface of 320 bits, dual-DVI and mini-HDMI outputs and support for 3-way SLI.
Consumers that want to be among the first to get their hands on the card may place pre-orders on the official website, although they will have to be willing to part with $500 if they do. It is not completely clear how much time will pass before shipments actually start.