Pricy WaterCooled GeForce 5900 ULTRA from Gainward

The Inquirer reports that Overclock.co.uk is going to sell a new graphic card real soon, the Gainward FX 5900 Ultra 1600 XP GS 256MB CoolFX. Nothing special you might think but it has a price of £616.90 which is about $990.77!! Twice the price of a normal GeForce 5900 ULTRA!

So there has to be something special about this graphic card : it comes with a Waterblock, Radiator, Pump and Tubing so you should be able to watercool this graphic card without any problems. This results in a very quiet 3D card, and possibly very good OC results but is this worth the insane price? Also notice that it has a 5.1 CH Sound Card and a FireWire Card included, and that it operates at higher speeds than the standard GeForce 5900 ULTRA's.


Specifications:

Processor nVIDIA GeFORCE FX 5900 Ultra

Engine Clock 450 + MHz

Frame Buffer 256 MB

Memory Type 2.2 ns DDR

Enhanced Performance + 15 %

Memory Width 256 bit

Bandwidth 27.2 GB/sec

RAMDAC 400 MHz


Bonus items included:

Included adapters DVI/VGA

ViVo Adapter (S-Video and Composite Video)

Included Software DVD / Video Editing

Included 5.1 CH Sound Card

Included FireWire Card

This all might sound very nice, and it is also good that watercooling is becoming more popular among manufactors. But still this card retails at an extreme price, and I really can't imagine that they will sell a lot of them. For that price you can buy a whole new computer!

But it might not be an entire loss of R&D costs for Gainward because they already gained some more experience with watercooling now. But I hope WC will not become a necessity in future, chip makers like NVIDIA, ATI, Intel and AMD should concentrate on making less hot chips, instead of increasing the need for more powerful cooling solutions.