Asus EN8800GT

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Rating: 80%
Review Title: No Sensors, But Brilliant Otherwise

Verdict: Brilliant card for the eye candy but no sensors giving fan speed or temperature. :(

This card seems brilliant In games,and handles pretty much everything i throw at it with full graphics, aa, and af at 1400x900 (excluding crysis, naturally). However i think my cpu is a bit of a bottleneck to it (Athlon x2 5200) even when its overclocked to 2.9GHz. The only gripe i have with it is that there are no sensors on it and it has a single speed fan,not temperature controlled although saying that it is quiet but the card runs very hot to the touch. I think the exclusion of a heat sensor is a big overlook by Asus as i have no idea whats happening to it while im overclocking it. The 'smart doctor' overclocking program that asus supply with the card is not a brilliant one but it does allow overclocking of the stream processors sepratley which is very nice. To bring up the psu problem from the previous review, im running on a corsair HX550w (550w) psu and i havnt had any complaints from the card.

Rating: 75%
Review Title: 8800GT Firmware Problem??

Verdict: Handsome card, nice package, brilliant cooler (not the one-slot jobby in the picture) but Nvidia Sentinel kept sticking it's oar in.

Ordered this card as part of a system rebuild with Core 2 cpu. It came in a mahoosive box with loads of goodies and I was expecting it to be fitted with the reference one-slot cooler. It was however fitted with Asus' own 'fan-type' cooler and memory sinks, a much better job although it does take up 2 slots. Out of the box first impressions were good, very good. So, I set to rebuilding my system, reinstalled XP, chipset drivers, etc. Downloaded latest Forceware for the 8800GT, installed, rebooted and up popped Nvidia Sentinel trying to tell me that the GFX wasn't receiving enough power so it had throttled the performance to prevent damage. I have a 1000watt Akasa PSU so I was pretty sure lack of power was not an issue. Shut down, reseated card and tried all the other PCI-e power connectors on my PSU to no avail. Uninstalled drivers, installed the Asus shipped drivers and still Nvidia Sentinel wasn't happy. Googled a bit and discovered that there have been quite a few recorded instances of incompatibility with certain high power PSU's. Nothing conclusive, but it seems to me that there is, or at least was, some kind of glitch in the firmware causing the problem. In the end, I returned the card to the supplier and paid the extra for an OEM 8800GTX which (thanks to a modified Zalman cooler and memory sink) is now running overclocked beyond Ultra speeds and around 15°C cooler than a stock 8800GTX. If the 8800GT works for you, I'm sure you will be very happy. Sadly, it didn't work for me so I wasn't very happy.

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Gigabyte GV-NX96T512H-B	73%
ATI Radeon HD 4870	88%
Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX+	86%
ATI Radeon HD 4850	80%
Nvidia GeForce GTX 280	79%
XFX GeForce 8800 GS Alpha Dog XXX	78%

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