How much would you spend for the peak of performance? For the price of a mid-range PC, Leadtek claims its Leviathan GeForce 8800 Ultra is in a class of its own. After we saw it at Computex this year, we were happy to get our hands on one to see if it lived up to the firm’s bragging rights.

Nvidia’s default clock speeds for its Ultra line of GeForce 8800 is 612 MHz for the core clock, 1500 MHZ for the shader clock and 1080 MHz for the GDDR3 memory (2160-MHz DDR). Seeking to launch the fastest card on the market, Leadtek bundled a custom-cooling solution to ensure the device could remain stable while running at the highest frequencies possible.

With its special maintenance-free water cooling unit, the Leviathan ships at a core clock of 684 MHz, which is 72 MHz above the Ultra’s already aggressive overclock of the G80 processor. GeForce 8800 GTX runs at 575 MHz and this is over 100 MHz faster. The memory clock was raised slightly to 1161 MHz (2322 MHz DDR). While it may not be a large overclock, that represents a 7.5% overclock for the memory modules and 11.7% for the core. The shaders run at the same frequency as the stock Ultra at 1500MHz.

We put the card through its paces to show just how extreme it really is and whether its performance lives up to the hype. First, we will look at the cooling solution and then subject the card to our torture tests. We wanted to see if it could run under extremely harsh conditions and still perform.

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