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We can see well that the graphics card itself is of the reference design. That is the card is still manufactured at the third-party plant by NVIDIA's orders. ASUS has nothing to do with its manufacturing. But the cooling system is another matter. We'll write about it below. The card has TV-Out with a unique jack. You will need special bundled adapters to output video to a TV-set via S-Video or RCA. You can read about the TV-Out in more detail here.
Analog monitors with d-Sub (VGA) are connected either via a VGA connector, or special DVI-to-d-Sub adapters (included into the bundle). Maximum resolutions and frequencies:
Now what concerns the cooling system.
The device consists of two main parts: an internal unit mounted on the graphics card and an external unit that does the cooling.
The units are connected with flexible rubber pipes and form a common coolant loop with special liquid flowing inside. It's not water, but special viscous liquid (for more efficient heat exchange) with various fillers to spare metal parts. All pipes are connected with special bridles. But you should still check them up from time to time. Vibrations may weaken the bridles, and the liquid may leak out. This is very dangerous for conducting elements that abound inside a system unit.
An additional unit that can be installed into any slot under a graphics card (it has a makeshift plastic PCI connector) and screwed to a PC case like a usual expansion card. It contains an expansion unit that accumulates the liquid and a fan to cool the heatsink that takes the heat from the water coolant. Fan speed can be controlled with a switch on top of the unit.
The internal unit, installed on the graphics card, is reinforced with a heatsink and a low-speed turbine (noiseless). They should help the main cooling device, because the heatsink on the graphics card is very large and covers not only the core, but also memory chips and the NV IO chip.
In conclusion, we'd like to note that the cooler is made by ThermalTake.
If you set the turbine on the additional unit to full speed, the noise it generates becomes noticeable. So we monitored operating temperatures with RivaTuner (written by A.Nikolaychuk AKA Unwinder) and got the following results:
Standard fan speed Full fan speed As we can see, there is no need in setting the fan to full speed, because we can get decent temperatures of the core (below 75°) even without noise. Which is great for such a card operating at increased frequencies! Bundle
Package
Installation and Drivers
Testbed configuration:
Test results: performance comparison
We used the following test applications:
Graphics cards' performanceThose of you who are into 3D graphics will understand the charts themselves. And newbies and those who have just begun choosing graphics cards can read our comments. First of all, you should browse our brief references dedicated to modern graphics card series and underlying GPUs. Note clock rates, shader support, and pipeline architecture. ATI RADEON X1300-1600-1800-1900 ReferenceNVIDIA GeForce 7300-7600-7800-7900 ReferenceSecondly, you can browse our 3D Graphics section for the basics of 3D and some new product references. There are only two companies that release graphics processing units: ATI (recently merged with AMD and obtained its name) and NVIDIA. Therefore all information is generally separated in two respective parts. You can also read our montly 3Digest which sums up all graphics card performance charts. Thirdly, have a look at the test results. We'll not analyze each test, because it makes more sense to draw a bottom line in the end of the article. You may download the results in Excel format (Office 2003) in RAR 3.0 or ZIP format.
ConclusionsASUS EN8800GTX TOP AQUATANK (GeForce 8800 GTX) 768MB PCI-E is actually the fastest graphics card to date, if we don't take the 8800 Ultra into account, which is not much faster than this product under review, but is much more expensive. So we can recommend this product from ASUS to all users who like to have the fastest and the most advanced hardware. You don't even have to overclock the card, it already operates at the increased frequencies. The only drawback is its bulky cooling system. You will need a capacious PC case and a vacant slot in your motherboard. Another problem is potential leakage of the coolant. However, such accidents are very rare, they don't happen systematically. Everything else is an advantage, plus a very quiet cooling system (when the turbine rotates at reduced speed). What concerns the notorious problems with the quality of NVIDIA drivers, we can already see some positive changes. Although they are still far from perfect. The current situation is much better than the crying shame that was happening in the beginning of the year. See the details here. The choice is up to our readers, as always. We can only inform you about this or that product. But we do not give direct instructions which products to choose. And another thing that we are not tired to repeat from article to article. Having decided to choose a graphics card by yourself, you have to realize you're to change one of the fundamental PC parts, which might require additional tuning to improve performance or enable some qualitative features. This is not a finished product, but a component part. So, you must understand that in order to get the most from a new graphics card, you will have to acquire some basic knowledge of 3D graphics and graphics in general. If you are not ready for this, you should not perform upgrades by yourself. In this case it would be better to purchase a ready chassis with preset software (along with vendor's technical support,) or a gaming console that doesn't require any adjustments. You can find more detailed comparisons of various graphics cards in our 3Digest.
ASUS EN8800GTX TOP AQUATANK (GeForce 8800 GTX) 768MB PCI-E gets our Original Design award (July):
Andrey Vorobiev (anvakams@ixbt.com)
July 24, 2007
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