Product Reviews

Asus's latest graphics card, the EN8800GS TOP, is based on the GeForce 8800GS, essentially a cut-down 8800GT. It has 96 stream processors instead of 112, 384MB of RAM rather than 512MB and a 192-bit memory interface instead of 256-bit.

Asus has overclocked the card from the 8800GS speeds of 550MHz, 1,375MHz and 1,600MHz for the core, shader and memory respectively. Despite the extra speed, the scores below aren't nearly as good as the 8800GT's, but there's still plenty of scope for overclocking with the SmartDoctor utility.

The huge 80mm fan and heatsink provide

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plenty of cooling power to ensure the card doesn't overheat when overclocking. We were able to push the core speed to 750MHz, the memory to 1,950MHz and the shader clock from 1,700MHz to 1,825MHz.

These significant increases led to around 15 per cent higher frame rates in our game tests. Call of Duty 2 rose from 59fps to 68.3fps. This is great performance for the money, but Sapphire's Radeon HD 3870 costs only a few pounds more and is considerably faster still (although not in Call of Duty 2).

The EN8800GS TOP has HDCP support and can decode high-definition video, just like the 8800GT and HD 3870. The fan is relatively quiet, too. The component video adaptor in the box is useful if your display doesn't have DVI.

At this price, the EN8800GS TOP doesn't perform well enough to beat the Radeon HD 3870 for value, and is undermined by the fact that Asus sells the same card, the EN8800GS, without overclocking for just £105. This has the same cooler, so you may be able to overclock it yourself to get the same performance. If your budget is tight, the £105 EN8800GS is a great choice and much faster than Sapphire's Radeon HD 3850.