ASUS GeForce 8800 GTX AquaTank

ASUS' AquaTank is a bit like Aquaman...

The GTX overclocking era is on us – made all the more obvious by ASUS’ huge offering here. The yields are just right for NVIDIA now, meaning it can squeeze more speed out of the chips. We just feel sorry for AMD with nothing yet to show.

The AquaTank takes up a lot of space – four slots total, so be prepared to lose a lot in return for the privilege of water-cooling. Opting to bundle in a Thermaltake Tidewater, which combines reservoir, radiator and fan in one, ASUS has also added another fan to the graphics card itself – making this card a noisy affair despite the fan throttle on the Tidewater. As half the point of water-cooling is to reduce noise, this is a little worrisome.

The other part is to reduce temperatures so clock speeds can be increased. In previous overclocking attempts, we couldn’t get our reference GTX above 630MHz core, from a default 575MHz. This is on air, and was quite stable.

The AquaTank starts at 630MHz, with a memory speed of 1030MHz, a good 130MHz above stock. The cooling did well, keeping it to 53°C at idle and 71°C at load – a slight improvement. Assuming this would open the door to further goodies, we jumped into nTune. With a bit of fiddling we were able to raise the speed to 655MHz core and 1103MHz mem, satisfying NVIDIA’s test mode – however this wasn’t stable when running 3DMark06, leading to nothing but hard crashes. In fact not even the smallest overclock would run through an entire 3DMark06 test – making the water-cooling effectively useless in that it’s noisy, doesn’t afford extra performance than air and takes up a ridiculous amount of space.

At its stock speeds it scored 3939, 3206 and 2853 at 1280 x 1024, 1600 x 1200 and 1920 x 1200 respectively in 3DMark06 – around 17% faster on average than your default GTX.

It’s hard to recommend this over XFX’s air-overclocked 630MHz XXX Edition, or buying a vanilla card and doing it yourself. Simply put, the AquaTank isn’t a sensible purchase.