14 DAY TRIAL // Lately, water-cooled graphics cards have become a common sight, ever more manufacturers delivering such products to market, EVGA GeForce GTX 580 FTW Hydro Copper 2 just being spotted in Japan where it’s available for an impressive 69,800 yen, about $840 US.
The FTW Hydro Copper 2 is built using Swiftech revamped Hydro Copper water-block that features a single slot design and covers the GTX 580 end to end, its base plate being made up from chrome plated electrolytic C110 copper.
This means the water-block keeps in check the temperatures of the memory chips as well as those of the power delivery circuitry, effectively cooling the whole board so no hot spots can form anywhere on its surface.
This design is further improved by the backplate used by EVGA for the GTX 580 FTW, which provides the board with additional stability (the backplate is also available separately).
The water-cooled cooling setup allowed EVGA to raise the clocks of this solution above that of a regular GTX 580, the GF110 core being run at 850MHz (118MHz more than Nvidia's reference design) while the memory frequency is set at 1049MHz (4196 MHz effective).
When combined with the 384-bit memory interface, these high clocks mean that the GTX 580 FTW Hydro Copper 2 delivers a whopping 201.4GB/s of memory bandwidth.
As is the case with all other GTX 580 solutions available out there, EVGA's card is based on the Nvidia GF110 core that brings 512 CUDA processors, 64 texture address units, 48 ROPs together with 1.5GB of frame buffer memory.
The board's bundle is made up of the 3DMark 11 benchmark suite, a few other EVGA tools, including the Precision overclocking utility, and a poster.
In the US, the card is listed at $699.99 (EVGA imposing a limit of two per household), Japan getting it at 69,800 yen, about $840 US, according to Expreview.
