Product Listing

ASUS EN8800GS TOP 384MB (GeForce 8800 GS)

By Vincent Chang - 6 Mar 2008

The ASUS EN8800GS TOP

The ASUS EN8800GS TOP

Since the GeForce 8800 GS is almost like a GeForce 8800 GT with lesser memory, we believe that it should be slightly less warm than the GT. Fortunately, ASUS has wisely gone with its Glaciator cooler for improved cooling performance over the reference design. This cooler has a very quiet fan that more than compensates for its bulk. Besides the two-slot circular heatsink and fan, there's also a small heatsink for the MOSFETs, though the memory chips are left bare.

ASUS is rightly putting its Glaciator cooler on many of its graphics cards.

Since this is a TOP edition, the clock speeds on this ASUS have been increased. Core clock is at 600MHz while the Hynix 1.1ns memory chips are at 1800MHz DDR. These clocks put the ASUS on par with the GeForce 8800 GT while its stream processors are also clocked higher than default at 1700MHz compared to the 1500MHz on the GT. Besides the boost in clock speeds, this ASUS EN8800GS TOP have all the features that you can expect from a modern graphics card, meaning two HDCP compliant dual-link DVI outputs and SLI support.

 

The MOSFETs here are cooled with a passive heatsink.

The empty spaces here are for the memory chips that have been removed to make this a 384MB card with a 192-bit wide memory bandwidth.

There aren't many accessories and cables in the package, just the essential ones like power connector and DVI-to-VGA adapter. We found ASUS' proprietary software like GamerOSD and SmartDoctor inside the driver CD and though there is no game or other application included, these software may be situationally useful for some consumers.

  • Driver CD (including ASUS utilities like SmartDoctor, GamerOSD, etc)
  • Installation guide
  • User manual (on CD)
  • DVI-to-VGA adapter
  • 6-pin Molex power connector
  • 7-pin mini-DIN to Component dongle

Test Setup

The system used to test the GeForce 8800 GS was configured with an Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (2.66GHz) processor and an Intel D975XBX 'Bad Axe' motherboard. 2GB of low latency HyperX memory from Kingston was also used, running in dual channel mode while the Seagate 7200.7 SATA hard drive we used was installed with Windows XP Professional (Service Pack 2 and DirectX 9.0c).

Since the GeForce 8800 GS was originally slated to be an upper mid-range product, we have compared it with most of the usual suspects for this segment. The GeForce 8800 GT was added for reference, since the GS is a weaker version of this card. The latest drivers from NVIDIA for the GeForce 8 series is ForceWare 169.32 and that is installed to test drive the ASUS EN8800GS TOP. The older GeForce 8800 GT, both 256MB and 512MB were tested with ForceWare 169.21 while the GeForce 9600 GT was using 174.12 beta. Both ATI cards in our comparison were running Catalyst 8.2. The results presented were taken using the included time demos and other built-in benchmarking tools available in the following games:

  • Futuremark 3DMark06 (ver 110)
  • Company of Heroes (ver 1.3)
  • F.E.A.R (ver 1.0)
  • World in Conflict (ver 1.05)
  • Supreme Commander (patched to 3255)
  • Crysis (ver 1.1)
  • Unreal Tournament 3 (ver 1.1)
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