Overclocked, Water Cooled GTX 280 Cards at BFG and EVGA

In the past, it usually took a while before NVIDIA's channel partners came out with overclocked and water-cooled graphics cards. But this doesn't seem to be the case with the latest GT200 series which, only two days after NVIDIA's official release, can be acquired in factory overclocked and water-cooled variants. And where else should you expect to find these cards, if not at two of NVIDIA's best channel partners, BFG and EVGA?

The two manufacturers are known for offering some of the best graphic cards based on NVIDIA's latest GPUs. That is why it shouldn't be such a surprise why they are the first to offer water-cooled GTX 280 cards, which obviously come with an overclocked GPU. BFG's version is dubbed GTX 280 H2OC and benefits from the company's ThermoIntelligence technology. On the other hand, EVGA's version, which has been entitled GTX 280 HC, boasts the company's Hydro Copper 16 Waterblock. Both these cards have been designed to raise the performance bar of a card that is already said to be the fastest currently available on the market.

Taking a look at the technical specifications of both these cards, we see that EVGA's comes slightly better overclcocked, while BFG's version delivers better performance on the memory side. As far as design is concerned, both cards seem to provide more room space than their standard versions, but also come with a dual slot form factor. In order to better understand the differences between the two performance "monsters", check out this small list of specs of both cards:

BFG GeForce GTX 280 H2OC

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280
Core Clock: 680MHz (vs. 602MHz standard)
Shader Clock: 1458MHz (vs. 1296MHz standard)
Memory Clock: 2450MHz (vs. 2214MHz standard)
Memory Bandwidth: 156.8GB/sec.

EVGA GeForce GTX 280 HC

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280
Core Clock: 691MHz (vs. 602MHz standard)
Shader Clock: 1458MHz (vs. 1296MHz standard)
Memory Clock: 2430MHz (vs. 2214MHz standard)
Memory Bandwidth: 155.5GB/sec.

The other technical specifications are pretty much the same as with all the other GTX280 graphics cards you will find on the market. This also includes one of the most anticipated NVIDIA technologies, CUDA, which unlocks the power of the GPU's processor cores to accelerate the most demanding system tasks, such as video transcoding.

Unfortunately, we couldn't find any details on the price tag for BFG's card, but EVGA is going to sell its version for $879.99 directly from its website.