Asus ENGTX280 TOP

Nvidia's new GTX 280 GPU is the best performer on the market, but it's under plenty of pressure from ATI's more affordable Radeon HD 4850 and Radeon HD 4870.

There's always scope to get more for your money through overclocking, though, and that's the route taken by Asus for its new ENGTX280 TOP.

It's increased the core clock from 602MHz to 670MHz, and given the shader clock a similarly dramatic boost, from 1,296MHz in reference cards to 1,460MHz.

The memory clock has been increased too, from 2.2GHz to 2.4GHz, though the amount of RAM remains the same, at 1GB of DDR3.

Yet, despite all these clock boosts, we found that performance improvements in our tests to be underwhelming. In our Crysis benchmarks only a handful of frames separated the overclocked Asus from a standard card: its 43fps in the high-detail test was barely better than a stock card's 39fps.

Single-figure frame rate increases continued in our Call of Juarez DirectX 10 benchmark: at high settings the overclocked card scored 36fps compared to the 32fps of a stock card.

And it was the same story in Call of Duty 4, with the Asus card scoring 110fps at high settings compared to 101fps from a standard model.

So in general, the peformance benefit of the ENGTX280 TOP is too small to be useful. Only once did it make a substantial difference - when we tried Crysis at very high detail coupled and with a resolution of 1,600 x 1,200.

Here, the stock card averaged only a jerky 23fps. The ENGTX280 TOP increased this to 27fps, making the game noticeably more playable.

At £319, the overclocked GTX 280 is significantly cheaper than the standard card was at launch. But it's still not a good deal compared to the competition. An ATI Radeon HD 4870 will provide performance approaching these levels for under £200.

While it's true that Asus' overclocked GPU did achieve the highest 3D benchmark scores we've ever seen, it's still too expensive unless you're determined to buy the absolute best.

Author: Mike Jennings