Conclusion

If you buy this card, you will be the King of graphics, you will be able to play ANY game in ANY resolution and with ANY quality setting, you will be the soul of any LAN-party, you will be rightfully boasting that you have the best VGA card ever, everybody will admire and respect you, you will be the center of attention of both your social and online environment and everybody will stare at you in awe when you start talking, BUT ... you will be about €700 poorer.

Well, if you eat lobster with caviar for breakfast and your biggest dilemma is whether to buy a Ferrari F50 or a Lamborghini Diablo, then this VGA card is made for you.

Seriously though, Gainward's CoolFX 6800 Ultra is a performance beast and is no match for the last generation VGA cards. In the future*, you will be able to see some other reviews with ATI's and Nvidia's latest chipsets, but till then Gainward's CoolFX 6800 Ultra justifiably can possess CDRinfo's BEST PERFORMANCE VGA SAMPLE.

Even with the low CPU performance issue that held the card's performance back a little, Gainward's CoolFX 6800 Ultra managed to make clear it's pressence taking the lead in all benchmarks and tests.

Another great advantage of the card is it's absolute silence. Honestly, when I first saw the pump, I thought that it will tear my ears away but I was left startled since neither the pump nor the radiator made any irritating noise. As I already mentioned at the start, to achieve this you must attach the pump and the fan to the case with the screws shipped with the package. This advantage makes it the perfect VGA card for movie lovers.

The only major drawback is it's price which is very high even for such a good performing product. It seems that the Innovatek water cooling system makes the difference with this card, but don't forget that there are other cooling methods too, enabling overclocking at the clock speeds Gainward's CoolFX 6800 Ultra is set.

But to be fair, I don't think that any other water cooling system will be as good as Innovatek's. This is because water cooling technology is at the primitive stage now, but only Innovatek has made it's stand offering a trustworthy system. So, if someday I have the funny idea to "fill" my PC with water, I would choose Innovatek's water cooling system. That's for sure.

*19/08/2004 Review Updated. Read more tests Here