It's always interesting to see manufacturers with different things in their product designs. ECS always has been known as an OEM manufacturer. Last year an interesting shift was made. They started entering the retail and e-tail market. That means a new marketing approach, yet also new products. They did so with success and now have moved onward into a somewhat more enthusiast based product model. Today we for example see a water-cooled kit, pre-modified with two GeForce 9800 GTX+ cards, and it's called .. Hydra..

Quite an astounding kit as well as price wise, though more expensive due to water-cooling it still a very competitive kit. Basically you'll receive two pre-modified GeForce 9800 GTX+ products and a water-cooling kit that is supplied  by Thermaltake. It's in fact the Thermaltake big water series that you can slide into you 5.25"drive bay easily. That's also the generic consensus for this product release .. everything should be easy.

We've actually tested the Thermaltake Bigwater product before, yet then for CPU cooling. So the GeForce cards have the water-blocks pre-equipped, the water-cooling unit slides into the drive bay. Pretty much the only thing you need to do is connect four tubing connections, fill her up, connect some wiring ... and you are good to go. That's 15 minutes tops. As our tests will show the water-cooling unit is exceptionally good for the GTX+ cards. In fact the kit cools so well that we'll be overclocking the two cards pretty far. The end result is a much faster than GeForce GTX 280 performing product.

A pretty fun kit I might say, though not very cheap definitely competitively priced. Considering one GTX+ will cost you roughly 229 USD in the store you can easily do the math. Two cards would cist you roughly 458 USD, and then you'd need to purchase a water-cooling setup plus the water-blocks. ECS will offer you all that as a kit, at a 549 USD price tag, and honestly I think that is not a bad deal considering our experiences.

What we'll do today is have a closer look at the product that is called GeForce 9800 GTX+ and the chip that is powering it. We'll handle SLI and how to install it, obviously we'll show you the product installation with the help of a photo-shoot, then obviously we look at SLI performance with the help of our benchmark suite, then overclock the rig, and last but not least, our verdict on the ECS GeForce 9800 GTX+ Hydra kit. So yeah, we have a lot of ground to cover.

Let's startup the review and please clock to the next page.