Watercooled GeForce GTX 280 Showdown

Some like it Hot!

Of course, while the factory overclocked performance might be impressive, there’s a whole lot more performance potential, not to mention fun, in these cards thanks to the extra overclocking headroom provided by the cooling improvements afforded by the use of watercooling.

We were keen to push both cards as far as they could go, and have spent a good few days tinkering to find the very best clock speeds possible. Of course, overclocking can always be a lottery and you can’t help occasionally getting a duffer, but as both these cards should be using the absolute best pre-binned GPUs from each of the respective board partners' GPU allocation from Nvidia, we had high hopes of hitting some really quite ludicrous speeds.

With the cards fitted into our makeshift watercooling setup and fresh from our GPU benchmarking suite, we started gradually increasing core, shader and memory speeds in 10MHz increments, and then 5MHz increments when we started to encounter performance instabilities. To test temporary stability we used two benchmark batches in Crysis running at 1,680 x 1,050 with 0x and 4x antialiasing, and then tested longer term stability with a full batch of Crysis runs – the equivalent of a good hour of intense GPU stress.

We started with the MSI GeForce GTX 280 HydroGen and initial results looked promising, with the core clock thundering right up to 790MHz – awesome! Sadly, while able to handle the short two run test at this speed, the card proved unable to complete the full stress test, but dropping the core speed back down to 780MHz soon sorted the problem and provided a much more stable platform to work from.


With a little patience (and more than a few blue screens and Crysis crashes) we soon had the shader clock up from 1,400MHz to 1,560MHz as well but rather disappointingly the memory clock proved unstable at anything higher than 1,205MHz (2,410MHz effective) with the core set so high. The eventual top stable result was an overclock of 780MHz core, 1,560MHz shader and 1,205MHz memory, which is still a massive improvement over even MSI’s factory overclock, and a huge 30, 20 and nine percent improvement over the stock GTX 280’s speeds respectively!

Overclocking the BFG GeForce GTX 280 H₂OC was a whole different experience though, with the memory and shader clocks much more open to persuasion from the start – the BFG’s memory actually started at a higher speed than we were able to reach stably with the MSI’s (albeit with the MSi card's core running at 780MHz).

With a little patience we soon had the memory running stable at a mighty 1,280MHz (2,560MHz effective), representing a very tasty 15 percent improvement over a stock card’s memory speed. We were similarly impressed with the overclock we achieved with the shader clock, reaching a whopping 1,640MHz at the end of our trial, while the core clock sat at 770MHz – just 10MHz less than the MSI card despite significantly better memory and shader overclocks. The final stable result of 770MHz core, 1,640MHz shader and 2,560MHz memory represented an awesome improvement over a stock GTX 280 of 28, 26 and 15.5 percent respectively!