ASUS EN9800GTX TOP Graphics Card

by Marco Chiappetta — Friday, July 25, 2008, 10:00 AM EDT

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

Tags: Asus, graphics, 9800GT, GTX, Car, graphics card, card, Graphic, 980, ICS, N9, GT, AP, AR

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com