Coolermaster Hydra 8800 and Glacier 600 GPU water cooling review - Hydra
Author: Luka Rakamaric
Date: 20 Apr 2008

The second cooler is used on NVIDIA 8800 series cards, using the G80 GPU.  It is called the Hydra 8800 and it looks very similar to the stock cooler. It sure looks nicer with the shiny polished metal and the blue fan, but in essence it is just a regular stock cooler. What makes it the water cooler is the Coolermaster modification of the design to include water flowing through the pipe in place of the heat pipe, so it makes the core temperature more stable. The cooler is quite capable to work without the waterflow because it uses a fan just like the stock air cooler. The same things said about the Glacier are valid here. There are two sets of pipe fittings, a lot of small bases for the GPU, memory and the PVM part of the card. All in all, there is nothing revolutionary here, so let’s move to the testing part of this exercise.

We used an 8800Ultra card (612 MHz core) and a 2900XT card (745 MHz core) to see the heat dissipation gains of each of the coolers. In both tests, the watercoolers were connected to the Corsair Nautilus watercooling system.

A couple of pictures of Hydra, as well: