MSI N280GTX OC HydroGen

Introduction

Pre-overclocked graphics cards are nothing new but pre overclocked AND watercooled cards are something of a rarity. MSI have seen a niche in the market they wish to explore with the OC HydroGen model based on the GTX280.

Despite MSI overclocking the GTX280 to 700mhz, a 10c temperature drop is claimed over the stock clocked 602mhz GTX280. This makes the OC HydroGen 280 the fastest  pre-overclocked GTX280 available and perhaps more importantly, faster than the recently reviewed GTX285. This is achieved by using a full cover waterblock which cools all the main components while remaining just single PCI thickness.

Obviously adding a copper full cover waterblock is not cheap and thus the price of £359.99 is £50 more expensive than the cheapest GTX285 we could find. However, if all out performance is what you want and you already have a water-cooled system then serious consideration should be given to this card.

Here's what MSI had to say:


Specifications

The differences between the three high top end GPU's from Nvidia are small but significant nonetheless and could have a major impact on the results of our benchmarking.

	GTX 280	GTX 285	GTX 280 Hydrogen
Fabrication	65nm	55nm	65nm
GPU Size	576 mm²	470 mm²	576 mm²
GPU Frequency	602 MHz	648 MHz	700mhz
Shader Frequency	1296 MHz	1476 MHz	1400 MHz
Memory Frequency	1107 MHz	1242 MHz	1150 MHz
Memory Interface	512 Bit	512 Bit	512 Bit
ROPs	32	32	32
TMU's	80	80	80
Stream processors	240	240	240
Memory	1024Mb	1024Mb	1024
Memory bandwidth	140,7 GB/s	159,0 GB/s	141,7 BG/s

 
As we see, MSI have increased both the memory and shader frequencies to better feed the core. With a whopping 100mhz overclock on the core itself, we expect great things from the HydroGen and it will be interesting to see if the extra 50 MHz is enough to dethrone the GTX285.

Let's take a look at the packaging and the card itself...