| Asus EN8800GTX Review |
| Written by Maxit | ||||||
 Supplier: ASUS Manufacturer: ASUS With retail GeForce 8800GTX cards hitting the shelves in good numbers, plenty of manufacturers have been quick off the mark to embrace the first ever direct x10 graphic cards and NVIDIA's next generation of GPU's. They all have one thing in common - they are built around the reference design from NVIDIA. So performance is almost guaranteed no matter which manufacturer you pick from. The ASUS EN8800GTX is no exception with a base core clock of 575MHz, memory running at 1.8GHz and shaders hitting the 1.35Ghz mark. So what makes the EN8800GTX special. ASUS have put together one of the best packages of any 8800GTX card on the market to tempt you with. The box is huge and includes loads of exclusive software to get you started in gaming nirvana. Five disks are packed in including GTI racing, Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, 3DMark 2006 for impressing all you mates with 10,000+ scores, splendid video enhancement technology, ASUS onscreen display software for adjusting PC games as you play and a driver disk. They even chuck in a cool cd wallet to keep everything neat and tidy! Back that lot up with ASUS legendary build quality and support, a handy quick start install guide and it's not hard to see why this card is already looking like a winner.  We told you it was big!  The bundles sweet too.
Now if the size of the box has scared you, you'll be relieved to know that card isn't quite as frightening. At around 23cms it makes your old 7800 and 7900 GeForce's look puny and some cases might struggle fitting it in.  To be honest if your going to buy a £400 card you'd better have a decent case to begin with and the average user shouldn't have any trouble. In our testbed Coolermaster Wavemaster case, it slotted in without any problems. Two of these in SLI and you might want to consider something bigger for housing - these things do get hot! Let's have a look at some major eye candy. People who get easily excited by next generation graphics cards might want to look away.
A special mention should be given to the ASUS warranty program. The ASUS EN8800GTX is backed up with a generous three year warranty. ASUS have a maximum turnaround time of 14 days if things should go pop, making them one of the best. An important when you are considering buying expensive components. 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 LabsCoolbits 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.  In The Labs (continued)F.E.A.ROne of the best games for the PC and a good test for the 8800GTX. 2048 x 1536 with full AA? No problem.   Elder Scrolls OblivionA huge hit on the Xbox 360 with it's advanced graphics and HDR lighting. Running this at full whack on a PC required a couple of cards in SLI mode to achieve acceptable frame rates with everything maxed. Not anymore. The EN8800GTX powers through and even provides playability at 16Q AA at 2048 x 1536 resolutions. Sweet!    No matter how many games we played on the EN8800GTX, the simple story is that current software just doesn't push this card to the limits. Even ridiculous resolutions and loads of anisotropic filtering won't tax this beast. Until next generation direct x10 software comes along, we just don't know how good this hardware really is. The likes of Crysis, one of the first to require direct x10 will be with us in 2007 and the EN8800GTX will get it's first real test to see if it copes with the games it was designed for. If you want to know why direct x10 is such a big thing and why you would want a 8800GTX graphics card to run these games, check out our preview of Crysis and this video clip of a current build in action.
{youtube}z6-e1Ze_ATg{/youtube} The Bottom LineThe best graphics card on the planet? Without a doubt. The Geforce 8800GTX is a killer piece of hardware able to push current games to new levels of eye candy with the promise of more to come when Direct x10 hits the streets. The ASUS EN8800GTX makes a very convincing case for your money offering an outstanding package at a good price. It's not the cheapest - you will find budget and value pack examples out there for less - but a solid three year warranty, loads of software, video enhancement and ASUS legendary build quality make this one stand out from the crowd. Overclocking was very promising and with better cooling this card could really rock. With the ability to run in SLI configuration (we hope to bring you a very special feature in the coming weeks with a pair of these cards running in SLI in our top secret system), future expansion with two cards should mean this kit has a long shelf life. Home entertainment enthusiasts will welcome the Splendid Video Enhancement Technology and low noise fan on the stock heatsink. Video playback was superb making it an ideal candidate for any top of the range multimedia PC.After all the hype of G80 and the 8800 series over the last few weeks, we can honestly say it's been well worth it and ASUS have provided a stella package to take your gaming to the next level. Top stuff!   The ASUS EN8800GTX receives our Editors Choice Silver Award for outstanding performance and features. PROS
CONS
Special thanks to ASUS for sending a sample in for evaluation. You can find more about their extensive line up of hardware for computer enthusiasts over at the ASUS Website.
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