ASUS EN7800GT TOP SILENT
15. Conclusion
We were very pleased with the performance of the ASUS EN7800 GT TOP SILENT. The card can deal with all the latest games, even at high resolutions with AA and AF enabled, and best of all, it does it silently. The produced framerates for most of the games were not that much lower than the X1900 GT, which currently is a high-end card. The EN7800 GT TOP SILENT comes already overclocked and its performance is higher than the average 7800 GT based card, most of which aren't passively cooled.
The passive cooling system that ASUS used in this card, is innovative and unique, due to the fact that the fins can be rotated so that they can take advantage of any other PC fans. In fact, if they are rotated above the CPU fan, which must be no more than 11 cm high, then the SilentCool uses the CPU cooler to reduce the generated heat from the GPU.
The overclocking capabilities were more than adequate, and despite the fact that the card is already overclocked, we managed to push it even further, achieving a stable system with 458MHz core clock and 1.31GHz memory clock. However, the tested games didn't offer any significant difference in performance, so we do not recommend overclocking this card.
The retail package from ASUS comes with almost all the required utilities, games, drivers, DVD software. However, an extra DVI to VGA adaptor and S-Video or Composite cables would have been great.
At the time of this review, the ASUS EN7800 GT TOP SILENT was priced around US$400, which we think makes it too expensive for a 7800 GT series card. Its performance probably makes it better than the average 7800GT based card although not enough to warrant such a high price tag. However, if you are looking for a silent card with good performance and are prepared to pay a little bit more for it, then this maybe just what you need.
Pros:
- High performance
- Silent
- King Kong game
- DVD Software
Cons:
- High priced
- No bundled S-Video, Composite cables
- No extra DVI to VGA adaptor
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