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- Date:
- Tuesday , January 09, 2007
- Author:
- Brent Justice
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
ASUS EN8800 GTX
We have a brand new ASUS EN8800 GTX installed on our high-end Core 2 Duo gaming machine. We dive into the gaming experience delivered in six popular new games. See how NVIDIA’s newest generation dominates the competition’s fastest offering.
Introduction
On November 8th, 2006 NVIDIA unveiled their next generation of DirectX 10 GPUs. This new generation known by codename as the G80 supersedes the GeForce 7 series of video cards we have all known for the last year. NVIDIA hard launched two video cards based on the new G80 GPU, they are known as the GeForce 8800 GTX and the GeForce 8800 GTS. The GeForce 8800 GTX is at the top, it is currently the fastest video card you can buy on the planet for gaming, period. Below it is the cheaper, and slightly slower, GeForce 8800 GTS. Don’t let anyone dissuade you from it though, it may be slower, but in today’s game it still packs a punch like no other video card out there.
You can read our entire evaluation here, it is quite lengthy, but will give you all the information you need to know about what makes the GeForce 8800 GTX and GTS special. Pay close attention to the first eight pages to get all the gritty details. I’ll just briefly summarize some of the specifications below.
ASUS EN8800 GTX
Today we’ve got a brand new, clean and fresh, full retail boxed ASUS EN8800 GTX video card. ASUS is well known among many, they make very solid motherboards which we have used plenty around here as test beds. ASUS is also well known for their video card lineup and the incredible gaming bundles they provide. The last thing you want when you buy your new shiny expensive video card is to not have any new games to actually play on it! ASUS provides some new games to get you started on enjoying your new video card.
The ASUS EN8800 GTX is based on the GeForce 8800 GTX (G80) GPU. The most important new feature is that this video card fully supports DirectX 10, which will be part of Windows Vista. This means once you have Windows Vista and a DX10 game you can enjoy that game fully in all its DX10 glory. For now though, the ASUS EN8800 GTX will accelerate DirectX 9 games under Windows XP just fine.
The ASUS EN8800 GTX features 128 unified shader units called stream processors. Each of these units are capable of calculating vertex, geometry or pixel data. If you check out pages [4] and [5] of our initial evaluation, this will be explained in much more detail. These stream processors are clocked at 1.35 GHz on the ASUS EN8800 GTX, so there should be a whole lot of shader horsepower under the hood for todays and future games. The core, which is everything else, including the raster operator units, runs at 575 MHz on the ASUS EN8800 GTX. There is 768MB of GDDR3 memory running at 900 MHz (1.8 GHz) on a 384-bit memory bus. The ASUS EN8800 GTX is fully HDCP capable and Windows Vista compliant.
There are many other improvements such as new antialiasing methods and anisotropic filtering algorithms that you don’t want to miss. Check out page [7] to get a detailed explanation of what is new in this video card. We will explore image quality more on the following game pages.
ASUS EN8800 GTX Pictures
ASUS packages this bundle in a rather large box, but it does have a top handle for easy carrying. Plastered very prominently on the front of the box is a soldier from the game Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter. ASUS is shipping the EN8800 GTX will the full version of Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter. From the front of the box we can see that it supports HDCP, has 768 MB of RAM and includes some other software. The back lists some basic features, but nothing very detailed.
Opening the box we find the video card in an anti-static bag surrounded by foam. We see the games stacked and tied with a rubber band and a couple of other items. Removing everything we see that ASUS has included a speed set up manual, which gives you a basic overview of installing your graphics card. ASUS also includes a CD pouch for the included CDs.
Ghost Recon is there; as well as a full version game called GTI Racing, and ASUS even includes 3DMark 06 with a professional license CD key to use to unlock it. Though it isn’t a game, it is fun to sit around and watch the demos play on your new shiny 8800 GTX, which can accelerate them pretty fast. There is also a driver CD and online manual included.
Looking at the video card it is a very large double-slot design. ASUS is employing the standard NVIDIA designed Heatpiped heatsink and fan unit. It draws in air from the fan and blows it out the back; thankfully it does it without much noise. External power is required and this time it requires two 6-pin power connectors from your power supply. If you don’t have two 6-pin power connectors then you have to use a Molex adapter (which is not included) to split from no less than 4 Molex power connections. There are two SLI connectors atop the video card so this fully supports SLI with another GeForce 8800 GTX.
There are two dual-link DVI ports available that both support up to 2560x1600 resolution. This video card is fully HDCP capable for those that need that function.