Asus

Asus’s packaging is pretty striking when compared to the majority of their competition and the Ghost Recon branding is some of the coolest we have seen on a product to date. Also worth noting is that Asus have made a point of noting some basic specs like 768Mb of memory and the fact that this product is HDCP enabled.

Asus provide their customers with a plentiful bundle. Included are 2 power cables, DVI>VGA convertor, CD wallet, HDTV cable, 3Dmark06, Driver/Software CD, GTI Racing and surprisingly, Ghost Recon. Considering the package is similar in price to other 8800GTX’s this makes the card pretty good value if you don’t have Ghost Recon.

As expected Asus have followed the reference design with their GTX and as a result we have a card with dual slot cooler and core and 12 64Mb DDR3 chips. Out of the three brands of card on test today the heat sink branding on the Asus card is the best looking with a design which follows the Ghost Recon theme.

Overclocking

Overclocking on the Asus cards was not particularly different to the other two brands and was just a case of loading up the tool of choice (the easiest solution is to try Nvidias Ntune first) and then upping the clocks in small incraments until we lost stability then backing down again. On this set of cards we found out maximum overclock to be 644Mhz core and 990Mhz memory, placing them 2nd in the review for overclock levels.