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Reviews Around The Web
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Choose Web Reviews from this Maker:
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Saturday, August 26, 2006
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Asus has embraced the nVIDIA GeForce 7600GT GPU and released a videocard which is not only ideally suited towards the occasional gamer and even hardcore gamer on a budget, but also doubles up the value by offering 100% silent operation which makes it ideal for home theatre PC's or just anyone who wants a quiet computer. Looking at this PCI Express videocard, we see that the Asus EN7600GT Silent/2DHT/256M/A features two dual link DVI output connectors, a socket for Component output (y, Pb, Pr), the SLI bridge connector, and the all important SilentCool thermal solution.
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Friday, August 25, 2006
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The Asus P5W DH Deluxe showed itself to be every bit as powerful as Intel's own D975XBX "Bad Axe" motherboard throughout of entire battery of tests. In our Office, PhotoShop and Windows Media Encoders tests, the Intel board had a slight advantage, while the Asus P5W DH took the lead by a hair in our gaming and synthetic benchmark tests. All told, performance deltas, between virtually all of the 975X Express based motherboards released for the Core 2 Duo, are going to be minimal.
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Thursday, August 24, 2006
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Coming from running a Crossfire X1900XTX system for the past month or two, I was quite concerned when I first fired up my system with the 7950GX2 installed - concerned because the system was almost dead silent in comparison, even with the side panel of the case off. I initially thought I forgot to plug the power cable in because my ears are used to the jet engine like startup noise two X1900XTX's produce. So much so that when I gave a glimpse to the CPU fan as I bent over to check the power cable, I had to double take as what I saw was a happily spinning CPU fan, followed by the ever welcoming startup "beep" from the PC speaker.
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Wednesday, August 23, 2006
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The only thing you?ll need to consider with ASUS?s PG191 is whether you want to pay extra for integrated speakers or whether you need a widescreen aspect ratio. If you?re dead set on a 4:3 unit, the PG191 is a unique choice for gaming - it?s relatively bright, has an amazingly fast 2ms pixel-response rating and the built-in speakers are good enough to replace low-end units. The only downside is that its image quality is middling at best, most noticeable when working within Windows rather than playing games.
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Monday, August 21, 2006
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While there were aspects of the Asus W5F I did not like but adapted to, the Asus W7J does everything right for a portable laptop. Gamers and general home users probably won't find too much use of this product, but business users and students should definitely take a very close look. The market is crowded with portable laptops these days and I think the Asus W7J has a good combination of style and features to make it stand out.
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The ASUS P5N32-SLI Deluxe is an excellent example of NVIDIA's nForce4 for Intel x16 SLI motherboards. The fact that I was able to install and run an X6800 Core 2 Extreme CPU on the board is a definite plus, as the new Intel CPUs are the fastest on the market today. If you want HDA and the new features of the nForce 590 series grab the 590 boards when they reach the market.
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Tuesday, August 15, 2006
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The Asus Crosshair motherboard is a welcome change to the world of me-too motherboards that has plagued us for years. By adding things that at first seemed like gimmicks, like the on-board LEDs, LCD post screen and EL-lighted back panel, the Crosshair motherboard has become a unique product that deserves a lot of attention from enthusiasts and gamers. It offers just about everything for everyone, and if you are going to be building a new AM2 system, I'd have no problems recommending the Asus Crosshair.
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With the A8R32-MVP Deluxe, Asus once again shows us a motherboard that not only is built well but one that also performs very well. Overclocking is only hampered by a limited voltage range on the VCore adjustment, and possibly the complexity of all of the available options. Utilizing Asus built in AI NOS, achieves simplistic enablement of Overclocking for the beginner. Add to that, HD audio, silent heat dissipation, dual GB NIC's (albeit one is PCI based) and Crossfire, you have one board that is, in this reviewers opinion, keeping nVidia engineers looking over their shoulder. It hasn't caught them yet, but they can hear the footsteps.
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Monday, August 14, 2006
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Being a cream of the crop ASUS motherboard, the M2N32-SLI Deluxe does come at a price premium. Valued at around $210 US, the M2N32-SLI Deluxe is also one of the most expensive AMD motherboards I have had the pleasure of reviewing. Nevertheless, with this motherboard there is a strong sense of money well spent. There are a number of unique features that make the M2N32-SLI Deluxe a highly desirable motherboard. From the board design and layout, to the overclocking performance, this ASUS product will put a grin on any users face from ear to ear.
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Sunday, August 6, 2006
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If you have the money to spend and are not insistant on multiple GPU configurations, the Asus P5B Deluxe mobo performs as well as Intel's current flagship D975XBX motherboard. Along with that it comes with some additional features and improvements in the newer ICH8R southbridge. It also overclocks like an absolute demon without too much effort - our overclocking experiences with the board were incredibly trouble and hassle free; when an overclock failed, we power-cycled and the board POSTed again. With the exception of updating the BIOS, we didn't have to use the CMOS reset switch at all!
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ASUS at least has made quite an effort to bring to market a rather unique version of this GPU. Its latest EN7600GS TOP Silent is overclocked (like so many other graphics cards now) and it also comes with its special Reverse Cool system with a passively cooled heatsink and up to 512MB of DDR2 memory. Intrigued? Well, we were very interested to know if this enhanced GeForce 7600 GS could stand up against the challenge of the best GeForce 7300 GT cards so we promptly put it to the test.
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Thursday, August 3, 2006
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Both these boards have two PCI-E x16 slots, however, the M2N32 provides dedicated x16 lanes to both these slots and only works with an SLI multi-GPU setup. On the other hand, the P5W DH, provides x8 lanes if both the PCI-E x16 slots are used and only supports CrossFire technology for a multi-GPU solution.
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Sunday, May 21, 2006
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Widescreen LCD monitors are everywhere. We have widescreen LCD TVs (check out our growing TVs section), widescreen LCDs designed for gamers, widescreen LCDs for graphics professionals, and widescreen LCDs that try and do a bit of everything. The reasons they're popular are two fold. Not only do manufacturers favour them because they allow more efficient fabrication and thus a greater volume to be produced, but consumers also like them because they offer a larger active screen area - great for aiding productivity, and for viewing widescreen movies and playing games. It therefore comes as no surprise that many companies are jumping on the widescreen bandwagon, including Asus, more commonly known for its motherboards and graphics cards. Here we have the £310 19in Asus PW191 and first impressions are mixed...
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Thursday, May 18, 2006
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Many of the features found on the AGEIA PhysX core architecture are still a mystery to many of us. The PhysX is said to have "dozens" of fully independent cores, which makes sense if the card has 20 giga-instructions per second (20 GIPS) like AGEIA told us. To sum the architecture up we know that PhysX cards consist of a PhysX PPU with a 125 million transistor chip built on TSMC's 130nm process that is connected over a high bandwidth bus to 128MB of GDDR3 memory running at 733MHz...
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Wednesday, May 17, 2006
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The ASUS P5WD2-E board supports a lot of features. So many features, in fact that it scored over 40 in our Features rating scale taking it off the charts so to speak. Crossfire is supported on the 975x platform if you are looking for that option. Hopefully NVIDIA will see fit to enable SLI on other platforms, as not everyone wants a NVIDIA motherboard with their NVIDIA video card, especially on the Intel side of things...
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