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| Asus EN8800GTX Review |
| Written by Maxit | ||||||
Page 2 of 4 The ASUS EN880GTX offers extreme video performance in the form of Splendid video enhancement technology. Basically this makes watching a movie on your PC as good as on a top of the range consumer television. Videos played on a PC never tend to look as good as on a TV partly due to the fact that PCs do not come equipped with the image processing unit commonly found in consumer electronic devices. Built into the driver of ASUS graphics cards, Splendid technology detects activation and usage of video applications and automatically optimises image quality for the best possible visual result. In use movies looked fantastic and took on a new depth and quality on our Apple 30" display. The Matrix looked every bit as good as our 42" Panasonic plasma hooked up to a Xbox 360. If you have been put off using your PC as a home entertainment system, ASUS's Splendid technology is well, how shall we put it - Splendid! The stock heatsink and fan are very quiet during normal operation. When things get hot it does ramp up the decibels but never like previous jet powered editions. So by now you're probably itching to find out if the GeForce 8800GTX is all that is cracked up to be. Let's find out. In The LabsTo do this card justice you are going to need a meaty system. A minimum 450w PSU with 12v rating of 30A is specified by ASUS and a whopping 850w is required for SLI operation (two cards running together). The card also requires two PCI Express power connectors. Think 6 litre gas guzzling all american hot rod and you get the picture. Our testbed consisted of a 30" Apple display, a watercooled Core 2 Duo system capable of running at 3.6GHz, ASUS P5B deluxe motherboard, an 850w Be Quiet! power supply, 2GB of PC2-8500 OCZ Platinum memory and a Razor Mantis mouse mat. Expensive kit for an expensive graphics card.Coolbits no longer works with the 8800 series of graphics cards, so if you want to overclock you'll have to use NTune - NVIDIA's own tweaking software - if your motherboard supports it or a 3rd party utility such as the ATI tool or power strip. We managed to get the EN8800GTX running at 620MHz on the core and a smidge over 2GHz on the memory. At these speeds, temperatures really start to rise and additional cooling would be required to do further overclocking justice. With watercooling setups, this card should perform very well as heat seems to be the major issue holding it back. We took a few pictures of our favourite games running on the 30" display at 2048x1536, 4x AA and 16x AF just to make you jealous. By heck, did they look gorgeous.    3DMark 2006Seeing as it's included in the ASUS bundle, we thought we'd start things off with a little 3Dmark loving for our GeForce family of cards. With our Core 2 Duo processor running at 3GHz, a 10,000+ score was recorded. Things got even better when we pushed the CPU up to 3.6GHz and overclocked the EN8800 GTX with a 11,619 score at default settings.  
Ramping the settings up to 1600 x 1200 saw a small drop in score by about 700 points. Push on to 2048 x 1536 and you can expect to lose around 2000 points. If you want high resolutions and lots of bling, the EN8800GTX doesn't disappoint. Imagine what a pair of these could do watercooled and in SLI - something we hope to find out very soon! 3Dmark 2005Now things are starting to get really silly. Running this benchmark at defaults and the score nearly breaks the 20,000 barrier.  |