Leadtek WinFast PX8800 Ultra Leviathan card reviewed

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Product: Leadtek WinFast PX8800 Ultra Leviathan
And it is: water cooled high-end 3-D card
Website: Leadtek
Price: $899

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WHILE WAITING FOR Nvidia's next wave of 65nm-fabbed G90, G92 and G98 GPUs (hopefully) by the year end, some Taiwan graphics card vendors do try to squeeze the last bit of juice from the existing green goblin's king of the hill, the Geforce 8800 Ultra.

Personally, if I already had an overclocked, well cooled 8800 GTX - or DAAMIT HD2900XT, for that matter - I wouldn't bother with upgrading to the 8800 Ultra, as the few per cent performance difference will probably only be really reflected in benchmarks, and not measurably felt in real 3-D apps.

If you still got the money to burn for this purpose, I had a very quick look today at Leadtek's entry in this arena: WinFast PX8800 Ultra Leviathan. A large box, stuffed with the usual drivers and mandatory 2-game bundle, contains the card and the cooling system.

While the card's integrated water cooling block looks slim and stylish, with a greenish metal cover, it's just not slim enough to have a true 1 slot profile - another 2 millimetres less would have solved that. In that case, Leadtek could also have to cut the slot cover to 1 slot width, rather than the usual 2 slot one. The user would gain an extra usable slot, and easier multi-card SLI fitting.

Then comes the fixed connection to a large, L-shaped "Leviathan" integrated pump/radiator/tank block with a 120 mm fan, also clad in metallic green. It is just large enough to require a pretty big full tower case to fit in - and you may need to lose one of your 120 mm exhaust fans to fit this baby in. And, of course, don't even think of SLI setup with two such units - not only the cards are a bit thick for this, but where to fit two Leviathans inside?

The card runs at a factory set 684 MHz GPU and 1161 MHz ( x 2 ) memory speeds, a healthy over 10% combined speed advantage over the standard 8800 Ultra factory speed. Nvidia monitor showed 50 C GPU temperature in idle and up to 67 C in 3DMark 06 run, again a healthy 10 - 12 C reduction compared to the standard Ultra at stock speed.

If you use Ntune utility speed adjustment with standard Nvidia driver, it's GPU test will refuse to accept any higher speed on either GPU or memory, though. Same repeated with Leadtek's driver and WinFox utility. So, I ran all the 3DMark tests at the default speed.

The test platform was the very same system used for the previous Thermaltake water cooler review - a 3.33 GHz FSB1667 quad-core Intel QX6850 with 3 GB of Geil DDR2-833 CL3-3-3-5 memory (2x2 GB plus 2x1 GB). I ran the 3DMark06 on the default SXGA and UXGA resolutions.

The results are as expected - in default SXGA mode, it reached 15081 3DMarks, great number for a singe card, while UXGA 1600x1200 was at 12176 3Dmarks.

Yeah, the speed improvements are obvious. However, are they worth an additional US$ 200 over the usual but 10% slower 8800Ultra, or roughly US$ 130 above that same standard 8800 Ultra combined with ThermalTake NF4 customised GF8800 waterblock for about the same performance - or even higher if you combine that waterblock with a Peltier-chilled or fridge-chilled water cooling combo? The internal small cooling pump and radiator in Leviathan can never match those combos, or even the strength of, larger water cooling systems like, say, Corsair Nautilus 500 or Thermaltake Kandalf LCS when used as a GPU cooler feed engine - single or dual GPU alike.

During the Computex show, I saw a Leadtek setup showing two PX8800 Ultras driven from a single Leviathan, presumably at full speed. While that shows that Leviathan still has power reserves left in it, I'd prefer an "open choice cooler", 1-slot thin card - especially if paying this kind of money for it.

In summary, a great looking card, factory overclocked to the very top of G80 chip capability, but a kind of unfinished job - slim it down another 2 mm to true 1-slot format, enable choice of high-end water cooling engines to feed the waterblock by selling the card without the Leviathan unit, and, well, reduce the darn price. Then, it might become a possible choice for Quad SLI setup sitting on top of a, say, Dual Xeon, 8 core Skulltrail gaming mobo. ?

Good
Top Performance, stylish Design

Bad
1.1 slot width, Leviathan's bulky internal fit

The Ugly
The price, of course

Barfly's Verdict