Introduction

With a 17th April launch date, one would expect NVIDIA to be busy prepping its new mid-range DirectX 10 cards, the GeForce 8600 and 8500 series now. Along with the impending flood of these more affordable alternatives, NVIDIA also has plans to bolster its flagship GeForce 8800 series with an Ultra edition, so as to head off ATI's R600 based graphics cards before they even debut. Understandably, NVIDIA has been rather closemouthed with details of this ultra high-end and ultra secret GeForce 8800 card, though the chipmaker did reveal that we would be seeing this card in May. Another tantalizing morsel of information offered is a jaw-dropping retail price of US$999 for the GeForce 8800 Ultra. That alone makes us wonder what NVIDIA has planned for the Ultra to be confident of justifying that price.

Nevertheless, until that day comes, the GeForce 8800 GTX is the fastest single graphics card for now. In fact, it's about to get faster and cooler, with MSI attaching a water-cooling unit to a new overclocked version, the MSI NX8800GTX OC Liquid. Coupling a custom water-cooling unit together higher clock speeds, the OC Liquid promises to triumph over the competition with pure performance and lower temperatures. To find out if that's really the case, we took the MSI NX8800GTX OC Liquid for a spin.

MSI has changed its blue packaging for a more down to earth color. Besides that, a rather large box is needed to accommodate this card.