Date:
Monday , August 25, 2008
Author:
Mark Warner
Editor:
Brent Justice
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ASUS ENGTX280 TOP

Prices continue to drop on GeForce GTX 280 video cards, and the ASUS ENGTX280 TOP is now priced very competitively; but is it a great value? We'll compare it to a stock GeForce GTX 280, a Radeon HD 4870 X2 and a Radeon HD 4870 in real-world gaming scenarios to find out!

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Test Setup

We will be using a quad-core CPU platform, based on an ASUS Blitz Extreme motherboard and an Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770 (Overclocked to 3.6 GHz), with 4GB of OCZ 3P-1600EB4GK DDR3 to make sure the system will not be bottlenecking the GPUs.

Article Image

Comparison Setup

We are overclocking our CPU from 3.2GHz to 3.6GHz (11x333) so that we can reduce CPU limitations.

We are overclocking our CPU from 3.2GHz to 3.6GHz (11x333) so that we can reduce CPU limitations.

For the ASUS ENGTX280 TOP and the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 280 we are using the latest WHQL drivers available at the time of testing, version 177.41. For the ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2, we are using Catalyst 8.520.2.0 Beta provided by AMD. Finally, we are using the WHQL certified Catalyst 8.7 driver for the Radeon HD 4870.

We also have Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista installed.

Please be aware we test our video cards a bit differently from what is the norm. We concentrate on examining the real-world gameplay that each video card provides. The Highest Playable section shows the best Image Quality delivered at a playable frame rate. To get a better understanding of what we do, please read this page.