Page 2 - A Closer Look
The green PCB on Asus' EN8800GTS 320MB has an approximate measured length of 23.5cm; pretty much identical in length when compared to the ATI Radeon X1950 Pro PCB. Similarly implemented, the 6-pin PCIe connector is located at the end of the card. The difference between the two products is the location -- one on the outer edge, and one near the middle. For cabling purposes, I would prefer the connector to be near the middle or the inner edge instead of the outer edge. (All 8800GTS boards should be identical though.)
Smaller cases may experience interference with the drive cage due to this.
On the cool side, the Asus EN8800GTS 320MB, like the box, has a nice Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter theme to its heatsink!
Spring loaded screws are used for holding the EN8800GTS 320MB's heatsink on. A total of eight screws are located on the top of the PCB; four at the corners of the GPU and 2 on either side to secure it for proper heat transfer from memory and other components.
Two screws are located at the second PCI bracket opening; also used for securing the heatsink.
The dual slot design so often seen in high end video cards is used for direct heat exhaust near the back -- the Asus EN8800GTS 320MB is no exception. The heatsink actually offers quite complete cooling as you can see in the photo above; which extends beyond just GPU and memory.
Thermal paste was used on the GPU, while thermal pads were used on the rest of the components. It seems to us that the paste on the GPU was not applied very evenly on our specific unit -- if your Asus EN8800GTS 320MB is running high temperatures, better thermal paste might help.
All solid capacitors were used on Asus' EN8800GTS 320MB.
A shot at the heart of this video card -- the NVIDIA 8800GTS GPU. It's huge -- with the integrated heatspreader it is quite a bit larger than a Core 2 Duo CPU.
Specifications of the NVIDIA 8800GTS GPU, with certain standard card details:
Manufacturer: NVIDIA
Series: GeForce 8
GPU: G80
Core Clock: 500 MHz
Shader Clock: 1200 MHz
Memory Clock: 800 MHz (1600 DDR)
Memory Bandwidth: 64 GB/sec
Shader Operations: 153600 Operations/sec
Pixel Fill Rate: 10000 MPixels/sec
Texture Fill Rate: 12000 MTexels/sec
It appears that it is a set of Hynix memory, but the printing is quite faint that I can't make it out of what it says when it comes to model numbers. However, we must say it overclocks very nicely -- see Page 9 of this review.
Ten 32MB memory chips are installed for 320MB memory in total.
Page Index
1. Introduction, Specifications, Bundle
2. A Closer Look
3. Test System, Benchmark: Half Life 2: Lost Coast
4. Benchmark: FEAR
5. Benchmark: Prey
6. Benchmark: Quake 4
7. Benchmark: CS:S cs_militia
8. Benchmark: 3DMark06
9. Power Usage, Overclocking
10. Noise Factor and Conclusion
