World in Conflict

On November 9, 1989, the Cold War was supposed to end.

It didn’t.

The landmarks, cities and heartland of America are now the battlefields of World War III. Lead the heroic effort to turn back the Soviet invasion and reclaim the homeland—one neighborhood at a time.

World In Conflict is Massive Entertainment’s award-winning RTS (Real-Time Strategy) game where you assume the role of Lieutenant Parker, and command U.S. and NATO forces against a fictional Soviet invasion of the U.S. and Western Europe. While most RTS games force you to deal with base-building and resource gathering, World in Conflict allows you to jump into battle immediately without the usual resource micro-management typical of the RTS genre. World in Conflict’s single-player campaign has quite a compelling, cinematic feel which is usually not found an average RTS game. But that’s not so unusual when you consider that the developers were influenced by the 1984 movie Red Dawn and that the co-author of Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Rising—Larry Bond—was the main consultant for the game. Or that actor Alec Baldwin, who starred in the movie adaptation of Tom Clancy’s The Hunt For Red October, narrates the single-player campaign through the eyes of Lieutenant Parker.

World in Conflict’s has its own built-in benchmark which can be found on the Basic options tab under Options—Graphics at the main menu. Accepting the default Very High Graphics Detail setting on the Basic tab, I jumped to the Advanced tab and left all settings to their defaults, but made the following changes:

Since I’m running Windows XP, Vista’s Use DirectX 10 Rendering and Shadows From Clouds settings were unavailable.

World in Conflict is very playable at either 1680x1050 or 1920x1200 with all the visuals cranked up and not a single hitch. Once again, the ASUS EN8800GTS TOP proves itself a worthy gaming card for the money, compared to the more expensive GeForce 8800 Ultra.

Overclocking

While pre-overclocked cards give you the benefit of an extra boost in performance while maintaining your warranty, most enthusiasts won’t be able to resist trying to wring a bit more out of their cards. Particularly since factory-overclocked GPUs and RAM are bin-selected by the manufacturer for their ability to run higher than their rated speeds. What’s really cool about ASUS SmartDoctor, is that it also allows you to overclock the EN8800GTS TOP’s Shader Clock for an additional performance boost.

I used the ASUS Smart Doctor to manually set the EN8800GTS TOP’s fan speed to 100% to make sure everything stayed nice and frosty during my bid to see just how much more I could coax out of the card. 3Dmark06 was looped five times to test the stability of the overclock at 1920x1200 rather than 1680x1050, to make sure the card got a good workout. EVEREST Ultimate Edition relayed GPU temperatures to me in real-time via the LCD display on my Logitech G15 keyboard.

The highest stable overclock I was able to achieve with the ASUS EN8800GTS TOP was 770MHz /1875 MHz/2120MHz on the Engine, Shader and Memory clocks, respectively. Which isn’t too bad, considering that SmartDoctor’s automatic overclocking with HyperDrive is a lot more conservative. Anything over that and 3Dmark06 either crashed to the desktop or gave me the dreaded “NV4_Disp has run into an infinite loop” blue-screen error. With voltage tweaking and water-cooling, you could probably get more out of the card if you chose to do so—though how much would obviously vary with each individual card, and would be determined by other factors as well.

Noise and Heat

While it’s important to consider the noise level of each individual component going into your PC, it’s equally important to consider the overall noise level of your rig as a whole once all the pieces are together. With that in mind, I set the EN8800GTS TOP’s fan and clock speeds back to normal and broke out my trusty Galaxy Audio CM-130 SPL Meter to gauge the impact each card had on overall system noise during normal operation. Keeping cool is just as important as keeping quiet. Cooler-running components last longer and can be overclocked higher for better performance than components that run as hot as a blast furnace.

Removing as much extraneous noise from the room as possible, the Galaxy Audio CM-130 was placed at a normal sitting distance and height from the tower (normal for me, I should point out). The sound was recorded at cold-start boot-up; idling at the Windows desktop, and under load using 3DMark06. EVEREST Ultimate Edition was used to log and average the card’s temperatures while 3Dmark06 was running.

I was surprised to hear the EN8800GTS TOP's fan ramp temporarily ramp-up to full speed like some of the previous-generation ATI Radeon cards. By comparison, both EVGA cards were almost silent on boot-up. Fortunately, the EN8800GTS’s fan quiets down to a whisper as the system steps through its usual POST routine.

As you can see from the sound chart, there’s not much difference between the three cards at idle when they aren’t processing 3D graphics in games—as there shouldn’t be. What is important is how loud things get while your card is crunching the pixels of your favorite game. Here, the ASUS EN8800GTS TOP comes in 9 dBA lower than the EVGA e-GeForce 8800 Ultra KO, and only a shade louder than the e-GeForce 8800 GTS when those pixels are really crankin’. Looking at the temperature chart, the advantage of the G92’s 65nm die-shrink compared to the 90nm G80 cards, is also clear. Every little bit helps when you’re trying to keep things cool and quiet, and it looks like the EN8800GTS has no problem doing so, while turning in some impressive performance numbers.

Final Impressions and Conclusion

With the “higher-end-but-still-affordable” 8800 GTS 512MB, and the somewhat slower but cheaper 8800 GT, NVIDIA’s G92-powered GeForce cards have helped them nail down their lead over rival AMD’s embattled Radeon in the mid-range enthusiast video card market. The fact that even with a relatively mild out-of-the-box overclock that the ASUS EN8800GTS TOP comes within striking distance of more powerful and expensive flagship video cards like the GeForce 8800 Ultra, makes the G92 and the EN8800GTS that much more impressive. I do suspect, however, that the only real challenge that the ASUS EN8800GTS TOP would have going up against top-of-the-line cards, is running at 2048x1536 on a 30” LCD display where it would probably run out of steam with antialiasing enabled and all the eye-candy of the game turned up (though SLI might even things up a bit and make for some interesting benchmarks).

If I were building a game rig on a tight budget today, and had to choose between a GeForce 8800 GT and a GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB, I’d go with a 8800 GTS 512MB hands-down—especially if it was the ASUS EN8800GTS TOP. The GTS isn’t that much more expensive than the GT. It’s faster and it’s definitely going to run cooler than the GT with its single-slot cooler. Perhaps a bit quieter too, since the GT’s fan probably spins faster than the one on the GTS, to compensate for the smaller form-factor cooling assembly.

The one advantage that the GT has over the GTS is availability, which has improved since its launch back in October 2007, but still can be difficult to find. It's not unusual to find numerous online retailers having the card backordered, and some not even carrying the card at all. With the old G80-based 320 and 640MB GTS cards being phased out and going at fire-sale prices, the GT seems better poised than the 512MB GTS at this point in time, to fill the demand for a card to take the place of the now-obsolete G80 GTS. After all, at the end of the day, the GT is still the cheaper of the two cards. Hopefully, the situation will improve soon.

Although it probably won’t unseat FRAPS as the Gamer’s Choice for a screen capture and benchmarking utility, ASUS GamerOSD has enough features to make it more useful than the shovelware that’s included with some video cards. Interestingly enough, if you install GamerOSD on a system that does not have an ASUS video card installed, it turns itself into a “30-day Trial Version.” I didn’t experience any conflicts or other issues while using GamerOSD with the games in the test suite. It does a pretty good job at screen captures and game recording, measuring frames-per-second—though it doesn’t save it to a file like FRAPS. GamerOSD will even allow you to overclock the ASUS EN8800GTS TOP while in the game, though I personally think that this is a recipe for trouble for someone new to overclocking. I think ASUS should eliminate saving screenshots to .GIF format and use .PNG and/or .TGA format instead. The limited color palette of .GIFs just isn’t suitable for screen captures of games. The only real knock I have against GamerOSD, is that unlike FRAPS, you cannot assign the Print Screen <Prt Scr> key as the screenshot hotkey.

ASUS SmartDoctor hasn’t changed—at least not appearance-wise—since I reviewed the ASUS 9800XT/TVD AGP card back in 2004. You’ll probably find repositioning it with the mouse a maddening experience until you place the pointer over the area around the Graphics Speed section near the sliders. When the pointer turns into the four-arrow Move pointer, you’re free to move SmartDoctor around on your screen by clicking and holding the left mouse button.

SmartDoctor’s voltage monitoring and alarm settings were completely disabled for the EN8800GTS TOP. Because ASUS usually makes their own proprietary tweaks to their video cards for their bundled utilities, I assumed that because I was using NVIDIA’s reference (read: “generic”) rather than the ASUS “enhanced” drivers, that this was the source of the problem. So I downloaded the latest drivers directly from ASUS—which are at Release 169.21—the same as NVIDIA’s current WHQL drivers—and installed them. However, SmartDoctor’s voltage tab remained unselectable, as did the Voltage Alarm Settings on the Monitor tab. For grins, I tried the WHQL 169.21’s from NVIDIA—same thing. There was a time when you couldn’t use anything but the drivers on the ASUS site with SmartDoctor, and those driver updates were between far and few even as NVIDIA and ATI’s driver releases progressed at a much faster pace. Since SmartDoctor is aimed more at new and inexperienced oveclockers, perhaps ASUS decided to err on the side of caution and not allow any voltage tweaks to the EN8800GTS TOP, which is understandable. Overzealous voltage settings can easily turn a CPU or in this case, a video card—into an expensive paperweight.

Though SmartDoctor no longer causes the problems that it did during my review of the ASUS 9800XT/TVD back then—just leaving it running in the background was enough to give my games a hissy-fit—enabling the alarm settings even after manually adjusting them appropriately, caused Oblivion and Crysis to crash to the desktop often. With the alarm settings unticked, SmartDoctor behaved itself and caused no further problems. Most gamers and enthusiasts have their own favorite overclocking and hardware monitoring utilities. So it’s highly unlikely that any glitches or limitations on ASUS SmartDoctor’s part will stop them from buying the ASUS EN8800GTS TOP. But they will have to make sure that those utilities are up-to-date. Even then, some of them may not work properly—or at all—with the EN8800GTS.

I installed Beta Build 1285 of EVEREST Ultimate Edition for the review because the release version didn’t work properly with the EN8800GTS TOP. Nor does the latest version of RivaTuner (v2.06), which doesn’t even recognize the card (as a result none of the low-level card settings for overclocking and adjusting fan speeds work). So you might have to wait a bit for your favorite utility to catch up to the EN8800GTS, or any other G92-based card.

Overall, there’s little if any fault to find with the ASUS EN8800GTS TOP. Aside from better availability in the channel, if there any changes I could make to the card, it would be black PCB, which would really make the card look great through a windowed side panel. I’d definitely give SmartDoctor a long overdue makeover. Something dark, 3D and sleek. I’d also add a novice and expert mode, with the appropriate settings to go with them, and give it the ability to launch from within a game the way GamerOSD does.

If you’re in the market for a kick-ass gaming card without the kick-ass price tag, look no further than the ASUS EN8800GTS TOP.

Barry’s Rigs ‘n Reviews would like to thank William O'Neal at ASUS USA for providing the card for this review!

Final Score:

ASUS EN8800GTS TOP Home Page

Buy From Amazon.com

Buy from Shopping.com