Final thoughts and rating
BFG is the first NVIDIA partner to market with a watercooled GeForce GTX 295 twin-GPU graphics card. The complexities and associated cost of designing a custom block mean that few companies will take it up, but BFG has teamed up with Danger Den and the H2O version is the cool (excuse the pun) result.The bespoke card is a well-manufactured product that deserves recognition for being first of its kind, but the very fact that it arrives non-overclocked - we'll have to wait a short while for the H2O OC, no doubt - means that it performs just like any other GeForce GTX 295 in games. Running around 20°C cooler than an air-cooled card when paired with a low-to-mid-range watercooling kit, there's intrinsic benefit in the design, clearly, but that's hamstrung, on our sample at least, by a mediocre overclock.
Shipping with a street price of around £600 the BFG GeForce GTX 295 H2O is some £200 dearer than a regular model. Is it worth it? We'd say no on this model, because the pre-overclocked version is just down the road, yet we fully understand that BFG will only sell a handful of these cards to enthusiasts who are willing to pay for 'cool' components.
Bottom line: a well-designed, well-engineered, watercooled GeForce GTX 295, BFG's is the first of partners to release such a beast. Take the price away and it's a wonderful card; put it in and it's out of the reach for most: you could buy two air-cooled GeForce GTX 285s for the same money.
The good
Great build quality
The first of its kind
Runs significantly cooler than an air-cooled model
The not so good
Premium price - £600 is a lot of cash to drop on one
card
No factory overclocking on such an expensive card
Sample's overclock was relatively poor
HEXUS Rating
HEXUS.net scores products out of 100%, taking into account technology, implementation, stability, performance, value, customer care and desirability. A score for an average-rated product is a meaningful ‘50%’, and not ‘90%’, which is common practice for a great many other publications.
We consider any product score above '50%' as a safe buy. The higher the score, the higher the recommendation from HEXUS to buy. Simple, straightforward buying advice.
The rating is given in relation to the category the component competes in, therefore the card is evaluated with respect to our 'extreme components' criteria, where performance and technology are weighted far higher than value.
BFG GeForce GTX 295 H2O
HEXUS Awards
There is no other pre-packaged card like it.
BFG GeForce GTX 295 H2O
HEXUS Where2Buy
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