Of all the cooling solutions on the market one of the most appealing and yet most feared is water cooling. Who in their right mind would put water in with electronics and hope that the inevitable does not happen (sheepishly raising my hand)? Water cooling is one of the cooling solutions that offer tremendous upsides when done correctly and that most feared of things when done incorrectly. The last factory released water cooled card I looked at was made by PowerColor, the HD 5970 LCS. What I found was that by liquid cooling the trouble spots with a full cover water block, the core clock speeds were increased by another 120Mhz over a non-water cooled card. Peformance was increased significantly as well with that card so the expectation is that the HD 6970 LCS from PowerColor will offer up some nice gains in performance with the enhanced cooling. PowerColor have again gone with EK Waterblocks as their supplier of choice to equip this card. The Acetal and Nickel plated copper is an enticing look that is all the rage right now.So what do you get with a card of this caliber when you shell out a cool 5 bills for it? You get a card equipped with a high-end cooling solution that is already installed (saving you the trouble and potential heartaches), comes with a warranty and gets a generous increase in the base clock speeds to 925MHz on the Cayman XT core and 1425MHz on the 2GB of GDDR5 memory. Seeing as how just about every one of the HD 6970 cards I have tested have delivered a clock speed of just over 1000MHz I have to wonder if the cooling will allow for some significant increases above that number or will the main benefit be just reduced operating temperatures? Let's see what the HD 6970 LCS from PowerColor has to offer and see if it can live up to the hype.