Rating: 70%
Review Title: Spend wisely grasshopper, spend wisely...
Comment by EdArch at 12:33am 17th June 2008
Verdict: like so many "overclocked edition" cards, the Asus isn't worth the premium. The best thing to do is buy yourself a cheaper card with a dual-slot cooler - or a 1GB version for the same money - and overclock it yourself.
I've always been a bit dubious about paying a premium for reay-overclocked cards. Not because I'm stingy..well, maybe partly because of that but with the number of decent overclocking software available (and soon to be) on the market for free, the only thing that factory overclocked cards have going for them is the warranty covers them at that overclocked speed.
I ordered one of these in April to go in my second PC which would be used to do additional CAD work and rendering and maybe the odd bit of game play. The GT is a quite impressive range, power consumption and heat are down while horsepower is up thanks to a faster GPU and shader units. But after a week I swapped it for a Gainward model with a dual-slot cooler quite simply because even though my case has two side fans to flow cool air over the card, with only a single-slot reference cooler, there's nowhere for the warm air to go, whereas obviously with the dual-slot, the warm air gets pushed out the back, letting your system run cooler in general. This isn't a major consideration, as the Asus does run 8* cooler than my older 640Mb 8800GTS, but the dual-slot cooler shaves off another 4* from the card temp and a further 2* from my system temp, which although, not amazing enough to have you running for the toilet, does provide you with a bit of piece of mind, and you can turn your fans down a bit! Also, since the Gainward isn't overclocked, it is cheaper and thanks to their Xpertool (which actually works on any nVidia 8 or 9 series card, regardless of the brand), I can o/c it as and when I need to, and because it runs cooler than the Asus, I can overclock it to the same level without worry. And still have £25 to go down the pub with.
Plus to add insult to injury, Gainward and a few other manufacturers offer models with 1Gb of RAM as well as the dual-slot cooler for the same amount of money as this card, which to be honest appeal more knowing that Xpertool or nTune will help you plug any speed gaps between those cards and this but then again you shouldn't need to as the extra memory will help with frame rates and line-drawing etc.
All in all, the 8800GT makes a decent CAD/DCC card and can also crack a good few games too while offering low running costs due to better power efficiency. It's a shame the range doesn't benefit from nVidia's new power management systems that are in place on its new 780 motherboards and 9800 series cards (or the new 280/260). But for the money you won't find a better all-round card. Just don't pay the premium for a bit of overclocking. Spend the money on a 1Gb model with a dual-slot cooler, get nTune or Xpertool, do a little reading-up if you're not savvy on overclocking and do it yourself.
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