The Verdict
The BFG GeForce GTX 295 H2OC is in every way an ostentatious product, it is flamboyant to observe the amount of performance this thing kicks out to your monitor. It eats every game to date raw and alive, then spits out the hairs and says 'bring me more'. It truly is a beast of a graphics card.
The design is awesome, the looks are stunning, the performance grand, the cooling really is returning good numbers... but the noise levels are below par.
So while it's not that the CoolIT performs bad temperature wise, no Sir. Temperatures are well under control. See the challenge is cooling capacity. The two GPUs produce a lot of heat which in the long run needs to exit through the 120mm radiator. To get rid of that heat the ventilator has to spin hard, real hard. The reality is that for normal cooling you'd typically set the CoollIT unit to mode two, but really that mode is just too loud for my taste. You'll end up at fan mode one which is reasonably noiseless, yet definitely audible all the time. At that mode with the graphics card maxed out and stressed your temperatures will then hover close to 60 degrees C. With the overclock of this product, these really are truly respectable numbers.
So that's my dilemma. Here we have a very expensive product. It looks stunning, is easy to install and is pre-overclocked for you at really high levels bringing you the most smooth gaming experience ever. Yet for me the noise levels at setting 2 or 3 trash the experience a little. Admittedly, I however am horribly anal when it comes to noisy PCs so you might not even be bothered about it that much. But I'd definitely prefer a regular liquid cooling setup with a larger radiator and some nice thick tubing where the fans will spin at low RPM. Anyway, with the H2OC you'll keep your card at cooling mode/setting one which is okay.
In the long run I'd admittedly prefer a high-performance liquid cooling solution with at least a dual-radiator, but that might just be me of course.
Right, with that out of the way... holy mother... the card is seriously fast... disgustingly fast actually. You have two GPUs rocking it hard while being clocked faster at default for you. As a result you'll play games like Anno 1404 at 1920x1200 with an average of 82 frames per second (for that game it's really astounding), and mind you that's with all quality settings maxed out and 4x AA enabled.
With a pretty daunting title like Tom Clancy's HAWX, also at 1920x1200, the GeForce GTX 295 H2OC will push out an average of 90 FPS, and at 2560x1600 that's still 52 FPS on average, with 4x AA and all quality settings maxed out. It's stuff like that that makes this card a grand testimony of its sheer performance.
Side note, we do recommend a card of this caliber only to consumers who game at high-resolutions. I mean once you pass 60 FPS at your games' resolution, it really doesn't matter anymore. So from a range of say 1600x1200 towards 2560x1600, that's where a card like this really matters.
To date I have found the GTX 295 series sexy really, extraordinary performance with two GPUs. Driver stability has been solid the past year and really, there's just very little to not recommend it besides the fact you have to put down a lot of money on the checkout counter.
And where the standard GTX 295 is sexy, a product like this is just cyber porn. You take a splendid GTX 295, improve its cooling, make it a stylish product that is very easy to install and then BFG overclocks the living bejeezus out of it as well, and that's what makes this product and BFG stand out from others. So if you can live with an average noise level and really don't mind paying a hefty premium price (close to 800 USD) then yeah, it won't get any better than this. Heck, it surely beats the 1700 USD ASUS MARS. What's also good to know is that the product is covered by a life-time warranty in the USA and outside that region... still ten years, we find that very classy.
But yeah... the bottom line is that this is true pr0n for geeks and hardcore gamers, bring it on, we can't get enough of gear like this.
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