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ASUS EN9800GTX TOP Graphics Card

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News Posted: Fri, Jul 25 2008 10:04 AM

A lot has happened over the past month in the world of 3D gaming graphics: NVIDIA launched the GeForce GTX 280 and GTX 260, ATI introduced us to the Radeon HD 4870 and HD 4850, and NVIDIA tried to rain on the Radeon HD 4800 Series parade by dropping the 55nm GeForce 9800 GTX+. If that weren't enough, we've already seen price drops on the GTX 280 and GTX 260 as well. The latest fight for your pixel pushing dollars is shaping up to be quite a battle, and it's just getting started.

Although the latest and greatest graphics cards are always a hot topic, we're going to focus on one of the established predecessors - a GeForce 9800 GTX (without the plus sign) in this piece. Our sample comes from ASUS in the form of the EN9800GTX TOP. If you are a regular reader of HotHardware (or video card reviews in general), then you are probably already aware that "TOP" is ASUS's designation to indicate that the card comes factory overclocked. "TOP" stands for "Top Overclocking Performance." In this case, the EN9800GTX TOP is overclocked to 755 MHz for the core (reference speed is 675 MHz), 1175 MHz for the memory (reference speed is 1100 MHz), and 1840 MHz for the shader clock (reference speed is 1688 MHz). One interesting note is that this card is actually faster than the upcoming GeForce 9800 GTX+ that we mentioned above, but the EN9800GTX TOP is of course not a 55nm part like the 9800 GTX+. In the table below, you can see how the EN9800GTX TOP compares to NVIDIA's reference GeForce 9800 GTX and reference GeForce 8800 GTX.

ASUS EN9800GTX TOP Graphics Card



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mazuki replied on Fri, Jul 25 2008 11:31 AM
ASUS has some amazing stuff in it's TOP line, not unlike what ATi used to do with XTPE, hopefully they release a 4850 in their TOP :)
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shanewu replied on Fri, Jul 25 2008 2:13 PM
It's odd...ASUS has a 4870 TOP but not a 4850 TOP yet... Maybe ASUS is still squeezing everything it can out of the clocks or it has something more special in mind. :)

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MikeL_HH replied on Fri, Jul 25 2008 5:02 PM

I really like ASUS' "TOP" brand. With a lot of the other video card guys, it's hard to tell what their top model for a specific chip is, without looking at the specs. With ASUS, you can just grab the one labled "TOP" and know it is the best in their line-up.

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3DtoHD replied on Sat, Jul 26 2008 4:21 PM
I love Asus, they always deliver on consumers needs.

 

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shanewu replied on Mon, Jul 28 2008 4:53 PM
That's a really good point, MikeL!

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nECrO1967 replied on Mon, Jul 28 2008 8:51 PM

Great review. Sorry for the late reply. I had a busy weekend.

Just a couple questions. First. Why did you test against an ATI 3850 and not anything from the 4000 Family? Second. Why no noise tests or results? A lot of cards advertized as quiet are anything but. Not critisism's just curious really. Still a great piece.

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