Product Reviews

Last month we reviewed Nvidia's new high-end graphics card, the GeForce 8800 GTX. It's expensive, costing more than £450 including VAT, but incredibly powerful and the first graphics card to support Microsoft's DirectX 10. This month, we look at the lower-specification Asus EN8800GTS, which uses the GeForce 8800 GTS graphics chip.

While this card might not have the stunning specifications of its big brother, it's far from low end. The 640MB of GDDR3 memory, down from 768MB on the 8800 GTX, is still more than on any graphics card from ATI. It's clocked at 800MHz (1.6GHz effective) and has a 320-bit memory interface, so bandwidth is no problem. The core speed is 500MHz, 75MHz less than on the 8800 GTX, but this figure is not so important. It's the number of stream processors and their clock speed that govern how quickly the graphics card can output graphics. The EN8800GTS has 96 stream processors running at 1.2GHz, while the 8800 GTX had 128 processors running at 1.35GHz.

The stream processors are different to the standard pixel pipelines that other graphics cards have, as they are flexible in their usage. For example,

Performance is stunning. The scores in our standard tests are brilliant and not far off those achieved by the 8800 GTX. This card is designed for high-resolution gaming, though, so we also ran the tests at 1,600x1,200. The scores weren't as good as for the 8800 GTX, but there's nothing to be worried about. With 49.7fps in Call of Duty 2 and 84.7fps in Doom 3, this is the second-fastest graphics card we have ever reviewed. There's the usual range of outputs, too, with two DVI and one TV out (S-video and component). The card has HDCP support, so it will be able to play protected content when it's available.

There are some potential problems, though. While the card requires only a single PCI-E power adaptor - the 8800 GTX needs two - it's still very big and takes up two slots. The large cooling fan isn't particularly quiet, either, so it's no good if you want to build a silent computer.

Still, the EN8800GTS is very quick at all resolutions and is much better value than the £450-plus 8800 GTX. As it's DirectX 10-compatible, it will definitely be able to play all new games and use all their new features, so it's a great buy. However, if you're on a tight budget Gigabyte's GV-RX195P256D-RH, which we review opposite, is less than half the price. While it's only DirectX 9c compatible, it's unlikely we'll see any DirectX 10-only games for at least the next year.