ASUS GeForce EN8800GTX/HTDP/768M Video Card Review :: ASUS GeForce EN8800GTX/HTDP/768M Card

ASUS EN8800GTX/HTDP/768M
Brand	ASUS
Model	EN8800GTX/HTDP/768M
Graphics Chip	G80
Graphics Memory Type	GDDR3
Memory (MB)	768
Graphics Core Clock (MHz)	575
Memory Clock (MHz)	1800
Memory Speed (ns)	1.1
RAMDAC Frequency (MHz)	Dual 400
Active Cooling on Graphics Chip	Yes
Heatsink on Memory	Yes
Video Capture	Yes
Ports
Dual Monitor Support	Yes
VGA Out	DVI-Ix2
Video In and Out	S-Video Out
Package and Support
Printed Manual	Yes
Driver CD	Yes
Performance Tool Software	nTune
Major Games	Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, GT1 Racing, 3dmark06
Major Software	None
VR Glasses	No
DVD Player Software	None
Video Recording Software	N/A

GeForce 8 Series Features

• 90 nanometer low-k dialelectic process from TSMC
• 681 million transistors
• DirectX 10 support
• Pixel Shader 4.0
• Vertex Shader 4.0
• Unified Shader architecture
• Geometry Shaders
• 128 Scalar Stream Shaders
• 24 ROPs
• 8Kx8K texture sizes
• Multiple Render Targets 8
• R11G11B10 HDR
• 5-bit per color with 9-bit mantissa HDR HLSL10
• 16x Coverage Anti-aliasing
• Anisotropic Filtering
• 575 Core clock speed
• 1350MHz Shader speed
• 1.8 GHz memory clock speed
• 384-bit memory interface
• 86.4GB/second
• 768MB GDDR-3

NVIDIA decided to use the 90 nanometer low-k dialelectic process off TSMC with their new chip. The G80 has 681 million transistors which is more than twice that of the R580+, and nearly 2.5x that of the previous generation GeForce 7900 series (278 million transistors). Transistors and process are only a small part of the GeForce 8800 story. To understand the GeForce 8800, I think it's a good place to look at how we got here.

NVIDIA is also launching a second card to go along with the 8800GTX, the 8800GTS. This card has 96 stream processors, a 320-bit instead of the 384-bit memory bus, 640MB instead of 768MB, is clocked at 500MHz for the core, 1.2GHz for the shader cores and 800MHz for the memory. The architecture is the same otherwise as the 8800GTX card. I will cover that card in my EVGA 8800GTS review.

First thing I thought when it came out of the packaging that ASUS shipped the card in was wow, is it going to fit in my case? The card is 23 centimeters long, which is longer than any card in recent history including the 7950 GX2 card. To answer the question, yes, the card fit in the case I use for testing video cards. The card needed to go in at an angle as the HDD cage got in the way of installing the card otherwise.

The fan on the ASUS 8800GTX is on the rear of the front of the heatsink that covers the graphics card, much like the fan on the 7950 GX2 was. The heatsink covers the length of the PCB, with a little room on the end for the transistors and PCI Express pow3er connectors. There are two PCI Express power connectors on the card, meaning the card draws a lot of power. NVIDIA recommends a 400W PSU with a single 8800GTX and a certified PSU for SLI.

The back panel IO of the card contains two dual-link DVI-I connectors. If you have two of the big Dell 30" 3007 LCD panels, this card will drive both at an amazing resolution of 2560x1600. With the performance of the card, I would expect this card to take full advantage of that resolution. Unfortunately, I don't have a monitor with the ability to capitalize on the theoretical resolution.

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