We're sorry to say it, but the ECS 9800 GTX+ Hydra SLI kit is a bit of a disappointment. The build quality of the GPU cooling and waterblocks is probably the most galling of faults -- we almost couldn't believe it when we saw the shoddily fitted waterblocks when we took the cards out of the box, and the situation only got worse when the PWM coolers literally fell apart once we'd started testing. The baffling inclusion of the blue LED lit paddle fan adds to the list of flaws -- they have absolutely no influence on card's operating temperatures and are so woefully underpowered that they couldn't ever hope to keep the cards cool on thier own in the case of a watercooling system failure. It's as if ECS just wanted something to stick some blue LEDs onto so screwed a load of useless plastic onto the cards.

And the problems don't stop at the card design. While the Thermaltake Bigwater 760is was well put together and perfectly solid, it could do with a bit of a rethink -- exhausting hot air straight down is baffling, and the fact that it's exhausted into the case and not out of it isn't going to help internal system temperatures one bit. It's also frustratingly loud in comparison to the stock 9800 GTX+ cooler even with the fan speed set to low, and when set to high it's intrusively noisy, having been annoying the rest of the office with its irritatingly loud drone for most of the week.

The final nail in the coffin of the instability and uncertainty you get from SLI drivers. As we've seen with our Crysis DirectX 10 results, SLI drivers are still far from perfect even for the post popular games, and we'd still have to recommend a more expensive single core GPU than two less expensive graphics cards in SLI or CrossFire. While some of the benchmarks might look impressive, the performance improvement is rarely close to 100 percent, and the instability and scaling problems just aren't worth the hassle, let alone the extra investment involved.

In short, while SLI performs well in some situations, it can't rescue the ECS Hydra 9800 GTX+ SLI pack from its more serious flaws. Poorly built cards, running at stock speed that disintegrate under load are not worthy of your money, no matter how bling bling the over engineered cooling system is. If you really want to get into the world of watercooled graphics cards, do it properly with a custom loop and not with this half baked kit that's high on ideas, but desperately low on execution.