Reviewed by Barry Little - February 11, 2008

Manufacturer: ASUS

Model: 90-C3G40-J0UAY00T

Price: Get the latest from Amazon.com and Shopping.com

When people talk about the number one manufacturer of video cards in the world, NVIDIA comes to mind. And when they talk about the top manufacturers of enthusiast products, you can bet that ASUS will be at the top of the list. So today, we’re going to take a look at a video card powered by NVIDIA’s new G92 Graphics Processor from a company that is no stranger to hi-performance computing or the gaming community—the ASUS EN8800GTS TOP.

About ASUS

ASUS, a technology-oriented company blessed with one of the world's top R&D teams, is well known for high-quality and innovative technology. As a leading provider of 3C (computers, communications and consumer electronics) total solutions, ASUS offers a complete product portfolio to compete in the new millennium. In 2006, the company shipped 55 million motherboards, which means one in three desktop PCs sold last year was powered by an ASUS motherboard. Our 2006 revenues reached US$16.5 billion, and is expected to garner US$23 billion in 2007.

To succeed in this ultra-competitive industry, great products need to be complimented by speed-to-market, cost and service. That's why all 100,000 over employees of ASUS strive for the "ASUS Way of Total Quality Management" to offer the best quality without compromising cost and time-to-market while providing maximum value to all customers through world-class services.

With unyielding commitment to innovation and quality, ASUS won 2,168 awards in 2006, meaning on average, the company received over 5 awards everyday last year. BusinessWeek ranked ASUS amongst its “InfoTech 100” for the 9th straight year. The readers of Tom's Hardware Guide, the world's largest IT website, selected ASUS as the best maker of motherboards and graphics cards. Furthermore, the company is ranked as No.1 in quality products and services by the Wall Street Journal.

About NVIDIA

NVIDIA (Nasdaq: NVDA) is the world leader in visual computing technologies and the inventor of the GPU, a high-performance processor which generates breathtaking, interactive graphics on workstations, personal computers, game consoles, and mobile devices. NVIDIA serves the entertainment and consumer market with its GeForce® products, the professional design and visualization market with its Quadro™ products, and the high-performance computing market with its Tesla™ products.

These products are transforming visually-rich and computationally-intensive applications such as video games, film production, broadcasting, industrial design, financial modeling, space exploration, and medical imaging.

The Box

These days, it doesn’t take much to figure out which video card is marketed for gamers. Sci-fi, anime, and fantasy characters adorn wild and brightly-colored boxes with the usual “X-Treme!” and “Superclocked!” buzz-words. The EN8800GTS TOP’s box is a bit more sedate than that, which actually guarantees it will stand out on a store shelf or display, and catch you eye among the flashier packaging of its competition. Utilizing NVIDIA’s signature green, black and grey colors, the box has a matte/satin finish that contrasts nicely against the ASUS name and other design elements, which are glossy and slightly raised for a subtle 3D effect. Which makes the beautiful female warrior prominently displayed on the box, rendered with the same life-like qualities you’d come to expect in today’s games experienced with an NVIDIA 8800-series graphics card, look that much better.

ASUS isn’t bashful about the EN8800GTS TOP performance, either. A bar chart in sharply contrasting colors screams “7% Faster!” than a generic 8800 512MB GTS card. In fact, not only does the “TOP” in the card’s title stands for Top Overclocking Performance—but the “Get ready to harness the hidden overclocking power of EN8800GTS” statement on the sides and back of the box suggests there’s more where that came from.

On the back, you’ll find the usual product features, selling points and system requirements. The print is a little on the small side, but that’s nothing unusual when there’s so many good things to say about the EN8800GTS TOP in over ten different languages—including English. The box itself is rather large, but has a fold-out plastic handle to make the trip to the checkout counter a little easier. The front lid of the box flips open and provides you with all the details and benefits of the EN8800GTS’s SmartDoctor and GamerOSD utilities.

When you get the box home and open it up, you’ll find the EN8800GTS TOP; Software and Manual CD discs, a printed Speed Setup Guide; a DVI-to–VGA Adaptor for connecting the card to an analog display, along with an S-Video cable and a dual Molex-to-PCI Express Adaptor cable for power supplies that do not have a free PCIe cable available. For the swag-conscious, you won’t find T-shirts or game bundles, but there is a nice, ASUS-branded CD/DVD-ROM wallet.

Some vendors try to squeeze as much in as little space as possible when it comes to packaging video cards to save the cost of a larger box. Others use an unnecessarily large box to make you feel that you’re really “getting something” for a higher price tag, when in fact, you aren’t getting any more than you would going with a cheaper card from another vendor. With both extremes, protection is often compromised, particularly when cheap or poorly implemented packing material or techniques are used.

ASUS, on the other hand, puts the extra size of the EN8800GTS box to good use for protection and organization. After all, would you feel good shelling out over three hundred bucks for a video card only to find bent and dog-earned manuals, scuffed discs, cables jammed in the box every which-way, and the card sandwiched between a cheap layer of foam that provides as much protection from potential shipping damage as an egg shell? I didn’t think so.

Heavy cardboard compartments and separators inside the EN8800GTS box keeps the accessories neat and in one place, while the EN8800GTS is secured in its own compartment, protected by thick, foam panels. The card is shipped in a protective anti-static bag. Old-school compared to the usual form-fitting plastic clam shells typically used today, but effective—not to mention making it easier to remove the card. Unpacking the ASUS EN8800GTS TOP is as quick and hassle-free as putting everything back, should you need to.

The ASUS EN8800GTS TOP

Making their world-debut back in November 2006, the impressive feature set and performance of the G80-powered GeForce 8800 GTX and GTS took the industry by storm and cemented NVIDIA’s position as top-dog in the graphics card industry—a position that it has tenaciously maintained against rival ATI (now merged with Intel’s rival AMD), ever since. To meet the ever-growing challenges and demands of business and entertainment computer video technology, NVIDIA expanded their product line last fall with several products based on their new 65nm G92 GPU—The GeForce 8800 GT and the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB, which the ASUS EN8800GTS TOP is based on.

Courtesy of NVIDIA

Even though it “only” has a 256-bit memory interface compared to the 320-bit memory interface of the older 320 and 640MB GTS cards, the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB can run cooler using less power thanks to the 65nm die-shrink of the G92, than its 90nm G80 counterparts. Which translates into more head-room for potentially higher clocks—and faster performance.

Another benefit of the 65nm die-shrink is lower production costs—which not only means that NVIDIA and their partners get to keep more cash in their corporate coffers cranking out G92 video cards—but that those saving are also passed directly to you and I. It’s a win-win situation for all parties involved.

The majority of GeForce cards on the market are all NVIDIA reference design boards farmed out to NVIDIA’s partners, where they are “personalized” with the vendor’s branding, and software bundles. To distinguish their products from the competition, some vendors offer enhanced customer service like cross-shipping replacement cards and extended warranties. Some ship cards with a bare minimum of software and accessories so that the pricing of the card comes in lower than a competitor. Others offer features that appeal to enthusiasts willing to pay extra for them—like faster clock speeds, that are, unlike do-it-yourself overclocks, warranted by the vendor—or pre-installed water-cooling hardware for the truly hard-core gamer.

ASUS overclocks the EN8800GTS TOP to perform 7% faster¹ than a “generic” G92-powered GeForce 8800 GTS card, and provides these additional software-based features:

Courtesy of ASUS

¹Motherboard: ASUS P5B Deluxe REV: 1.03G BIOS: 0804 CPU: Intel Pentium 4 2.66GHz/8M Kentsfield-1066 Memory: 1024M*2 (DDR2-Transcend) Resolution: 1920x1200. Scores are base on 3Dmark06 test, which may vary on different platforms.

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Copyright © 2003-2008 by Barry Little. All Rights Reserved.