Water-cooled Graphics Card Represents Vista's High-end

The hope of computer vendors and OEMs everywhere is that Windows Vista's graphical capabilities, which include the performance of its DirectX 10 drivers, will drive PC sales to the point where market growth resumes the comfortable 12% growth pattern from which it's fallen in recent months. Part of Vista's appeal is that it's the first Windows edition in well over a decade to show off the capabilities of what the processing power of its host computer can actually do - not even XP, for all its value, quite managed that feat even at launch.

In hopes there's a trend to capitalize on, graphics card manufacturer BFG is adding onto its add-on: specifically, tacking a water cooler onto its top-of-the-line nVidia 8800 GTX-based graphics card, then leveraging the water cooler's presence as an excuse to crank up the volume even further. If a BFG 8800 GTX OC-equipped system ranks a "5" on the new Vista WSPR scale, then maybe it's the company's hope that your computer currently ranks about a "2."

Earlier this month at CES, BFG introduced an overclocked 8800 GTX card based on nVidia's latest generation 8800 series cards, which were introduced last November. Without the overclocking, the 8800s showed about 30% greater general performance than nVidia's 7900 series, introduced last March. Overclocking doesn't necessarily provide proportionately better performance, but it certainly shakes things up, and with some of the very latest games, the differences are detectable even at the highest resolutions.

The CES edition of BFG's OC cards cranked the core clock speed from its typical 575 MHz to 600 MHz, and tweaked the shader clock speed (the separate timer that applies to pipeline-optimized operations such as shading polygons) from 1350 MHz to 1400 MHz.

With the water-cooling option added -- a custom-built device for BFG by add-on manufacturer Danger Den -- the core clock speed gets bumped up to 650 MHz, and the shader clock to 1500 MHz. On top of that, the memory clock speed gets throttled from 1800 MHz to 2000 MHz.

What are we talking about in terms of relative performance? One of the most frequently used games in benchmarking today is F.E.A.R.. In a shading test using this game, the top-of-the-line nVidia card in 2003, the 5900 series, scored a 5 (12 x 10 resolution, 4x anti-aliasing, 8x anisotropic filtering). By comparison, the non-overclocked 8800 GTX reference card, with the same settings, scored a 97. This is just one measure of how far relative performance has evolved in just four years' time, by virtue of refining pipeline-based architectures.

As far as price is concerned, that soaring scale may apply there as well. We found online retailers selling the basic BFG 8800 GTX card for $599. By itself, the Danger Den cooler sells for $139, but add it to the card and turn up the volume, and the suggested retail price becomes $899. With demand for the 8800 series still very high, street prices aren't likely to be much lower.

While Vista's new graphics capabilities enable graphics cards manufacturers to raise the bar much higher, and then visibly demonstrate the results of having done so, there's also a good possibility that the high end of the Vista scale could be shaping up to become a very exclusive club.