With the box and its content out the way it is time to have a look at the card in question and just what exactly MSI have done with this water cooled solution.
The card is pretty full on, lots of little tubes coming out of it, 120mm radiator attached to it and all in all looks kind of scary to set up. Fortunately it is not. While the particular image might make it difficult to see how much tubing there is and if it is going to be enough for your case it should not be an issue for most full tower cases. You are going to be perfect if you have a 120mm spot sitting above your motherboard I/O ports though.
Moving in closer to the card we can see the water block which is considerably larger than what the Tide Water ever offered along with a giant heat sink. The water block manages to cool the GPU while the heat sink takes care of the memory.
Just to the left of the water block is a little tiny pump that helps push the liquid throughout the card and keep it cool.
The radiator is not anything too out of the ordinary, it is a simple 120mm design that has an inlet and outlet on it, the fan comes already mounted and we have a single power cable that runs out for the fan.
The PSB is of course very standard and like all GTX cards we have two PCI Express 6-pin power connectors across the top of the card.
Turning the card over we have the same mounting holes as the standard GTX cooler.
The card of course still carries the two SLI connectors across the top and while it might look like SLI is not going to be possible, while being a bit fiddly it is not difficult at all. You just find yourself being a bit more cautious of the pipes.
I/O is the same as all 8800 GTXs with our two dual-link DVI ports and TV-out port. It also still only takes up two slots like a standard GTX which is good.
The standard 8800 GTX comes in with a Core / Memory clock of 575MHz / 1800MHz DDR. Out of the box the MSI 8800 GTX OC Liquid is 610MHz / 2000MHz DDR which is quite a decent bump in performance and only just behind the new GeForce 8800 Ultra with clocks of 612MHz / 2160MHz DDR. It is going to prove for some interesting testing!
Overall the design of the card is fantastic. It is hard to fault. It looks great and is an absolute breeze to set up. It is designed for a certain group of people though it is probably the best all in one WC solutions available.
