14 DAY TRIAL // According to details in the industry, EVGA and Zotac, two of NVIDIA's largest board partners, are expected to release water-cooled versions of NVIDIA's highest-performance graphics card to date, the dual-GPU GeForce GTX 295. Using such a cooling solution, these cards will likely be pushed to their limits, offering a factory-overclocked core speed and consequently a considerable boost in performance. This should come as great news to technology enthusiasts who are trying to break some of those 3DMark top scores.
As most of you probably already know by now, the GeForce GTX 295 graphics card has basically been launched as NVIDIA's alternative to AMD's highest-performance desktop graphics card to date, more specifically the Radeon HD 4870 X2. These two cards have several things in common, including the fact that they use a dual-GPU configuration to provide the end user with a performance level that exceeds that of a single GPU solution. However, there are some differences between the two, some of which have enabled NVIDIA's card to claim the highest performance currently available on the market.
There are few details to go on regarding the two water-cooled cards from EVGA and Zotac, but it's likely that these versions will also be factory overclocked, given their cooling solution. Currently, a standard GTX 295 is capable of providing 480 processor cores, clocked at 1242MHz, and featuring a 576MHz core speed. With 1792MB of GDDR3 memory, clocked at 999MHz, the card can provide a texture fill rate of 92.2 billion/sec.
Despite no details as to when these cards will become available, it's likely that we will see them at this year's CeBit show in Hannover, Germany, which will debut on March 3. By that time we could also see them in some high-end gaming rigs designed by major vendors.