ASUS EN7900GT TOP SLi - Review

[H3LL10N]

ASUS EN7900GT-TOP- SLi





Introduction
Choosing a video card back in the day was simple. You normally had just a handful of options to pick from; prices were well defined and usually fairly representative of respective performance. Fast forward a few years and you have an almost endless assortment of variations from manufacturers with a ludicrous, bewildering jumble of prices. It’s really a horde of confusion out there and choosing the ‘right’ video card has really become a pain in the neck, even for veterans who have been familiar with constant upgrade cycles for years.

Nvidia’s Geforce 7 series is targeted comprehensively at the whole market with a ‘blanket’ coverage approach, offering a full range of options for every budget and need. Even at the higher end, you may find significant price differences between the variants occupying it. The ‘cheaper’ Geforce 7900 models may still have performance that may in some cases approach within 80% of the most expensive models, yet they may cost nearly 50% less. Here is where the term ‘value’ comes in.

“Value� can be hard to define. A prime case example would be Nvidia’s famous Geforce 4 Ti4200 which delivered some of the best framerates per dollar spent in video card history. Such video cards usually signify money well spent. Given the huge number of options available today, folks with limited budgets should be extra careful in deciding what to buy and what to avoid. You could end up paying more than twice the price for something thats barely 5% faster OR you could buy something that is just a little bit slower, does the job almost as good and yet costs just half the price.

The ASUS EN7900GT ‘TOP’ is built around Nvidia’s ‘G71’ technology which focuses on both performance and efficiency at the same time. It’s priced at around $299-350 while its bigger brother, the Geforce 7900GTX, costs almost $200 more. However, contrary to what the price difference would initially suggest, the 7900GT is no ‘cripple’. The 7900GT replaces the 7800GT as Nvidia’s new ‘value oriented’ high end product. Unlike the 7800GT, which had a few missing pipelines and lower clocks compared to the 7800GTX, the 7900GT has exactly the same feature set as the 7900GTX, possesses no ‘missing’ pipelines or ‘neutered’ memory interface and the only difference lies in the lower clock speeds. Given the prospective performance of pairing two of these cards together in ‘SLi’ mode to achieve framerates completely unheard of even on the $500 7900GTX, the potential value for money would be no less than incredible.

[Click here to read more about the ASUS EN-7900GTX and the G71 technology]



Today we have not one, but two video cards based on the Geforce 7900GT. They are built by ASUS, the add-in board vendor known for its approach towards quality and added value to its products. Our samples today are no different and are no ‘ordinary’ 7900GT's. These are ASUS's custom ‘TOP’ variants of the ‘standard’ Geforce 7900GT with some additional megahertz packed into the stock 7900GT clocks and are some of the best built 7900GT’s on the planet.

Apart from the usually stellar build quality we have come to associate with ASUS, these boards also ship with some novel software features which may play significantly into your personal buying decision.




Splendidâ„¢
Splendidâ„¢ is a breathtaking innovation that brings the video viewing experience on PC to the next level. Built into the driver of ASUS graphics cards, Splendidâ„¢ Video Enhancing Technology detects activation and usage of video applications and automatically optimizes image quality for the best visual result.

GameFace Liveâ„¢
ASUS innovative GameFaceâ„¢ technology, real time audio/video communication feature elevates the interactive gaming experience by enabling point-to-point video conferencing functions and online gaming to take place simultaneously. Now integrated with an Instant Messenger Client to enhance communication inside and outside of the game battles.

GameLive Showâ„¢
Just like people who share their lives and thoughts on blogs, expert gamers often want to show off their perfectly executed strategies and five-hit combinations to other gamers. GameLive Showâ„¢ is another innovative feature incorporated in ASUS graphics cards that is created to allow gamers to stream broadcast their gaming experience live over the Internet. Other players can now go online to check out how you expertly beat the whole game.

Game Replayâ„¢
Practice makes perfect and that holds true in gaming as well. For popular LAN party team games such as Counter Strike and Unreal Tournament, strategy is the key to victory. GameReplayâ„¢ records your gaming experiences into MPEG4 video files so that your team can review all the moves and tactics later on to get better for the next tournament. The recorded files can also be used as screen savers or posted on blogs.

Video Security Onlineâ„¢
Whether you're online or not, ASUS Video Security Onlineâ„¢ provides you a flexible and economical security system. It can easily turn your computer into your own security system, complete with a set of excellant monitoring tools.


[The above information was taken from the ASUS brochure]


These ASUS technologies are exclusive to ASUS cards alone and this is what separates ASUS from other board vendors. ASUS is one of the only vendors around that actively works on software to add value to its hardware products. The ‘Splendid’ technology for instance, not only increases image quality through sharper colors but also helps in a greater DVD experience through interlacing and correct expansion of the viewing screen.



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First Impressions



The ASUS EN7900GT ‘TOP’, on first impression looks quite a bit like a reference board. It has the same sleek, efficient profile, and doesn’t give the chunky, beastly impression the ASUS EN-7900GTX threw at us. If the 7900GTX is the big, bad, bullying ‘beast’, then the 7900GT is the stealthy and covert ninja, more female than male, with its prime purpose being mission accomplishment accompanied by minimal collateral damage. Please pardon the cheesiness on this one.

It’s pretty in its own right. The heatsink, while not all that fancy, is still a bit larger than the stock cooler on regular 7900GT’s. The primary difference here lies in the fact that the ASUS EN-7900GT TOP's cooler covers the memory chips as well, whereas on regular 7900GT boards the memory is usually left bare and naked. While it’s hard to substantiate real world gains from memory cooling, nevertheless, cooler memory chips have the tendency to remain more stable while running at overclocked speeds, so it was really nice of ASUS to keep this in mind.

Of course, while ASUS tries to make it look a bit overwhelming with the customary ‘King Kong’ sticker, we were still expecting a bit more original aesthetics from them. The green PCB could have been black. The fan itself is almost noiseless in operation and even with both cards paired up and running in SLi they barely made their aural presence felt at all.



Beneath the heatsink of the ASUS EN7900GTX 'TOP' sits the G71 core, clocked at 520MHz vs. 450MHz on regular 7900GT’s. This translates to 15% higher core clocks. The 256mb GDDR3 memory is clocked at 1440MHz vs. the 1320MHz on reference 7900GT's, and if you do the math this results in a peak theoretical memory bandwidth of nearly 46.1GB/s compared to 42.24GB/s on reference boards. This should give the ASUS EN-7900GT ‘TOP’ a theoretical gain in peak memory bandwidth of about 9% compared to ‘normal’ 7900GT’s. We will investigate how well the gains in core and memory speeds translate to real world performance in both dual (SLi) and single card situations.

Here is a quick run down of the technical specifications of the ASUS EN-7900GT ‘TOP’ with the main areas of difference compared to ordinary 7900GT’s highlighted in red.




SLi – hooked up and ready to roll…



The bundle is the usual stuff from ASUS. You get a copy of Peter Jackson’s King Kong and Xpand Rally in addition to the ubiquitous DVD player and numerous software utilities fattening up the box. Also present, are almost all the connectors you may ever need. No complaints here.









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Test System


First of all, these are no ‘minimal’ experience tests. Our samples were instantly put to the task with some heavy abuse dealt from all fronts. Don’t get misled by low framerates, since our tests are focused on worst case scenarios. The two ASUS EN-7900GT’s were tested at 1280x1024/960 and 1600x1200 in both single and dual card configurations using the ForceWare 84.43 drivers. The former represents the median resolution most people should be playing at with these video cards, while the latter represents an upper limit used by the more demanding of gamers. Gaming benchmarks were all done with in-game FRAP’s runs and the average framerates are shown. ALL graphics options available in-game were set to the maximum possible unless where specified. Anti-aliasing was set to four samples, and the level of anisotropic filtering was set variably according to optimal game preference and experience. For comparison purposes, a vanilla 7900GT from ASUS was used at reference specification clocks and the 'TOP' setup was downclocked for reference SLi.

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Futuremark’s 3DMark suite has been the most popular synthetic 3D graphics benchmark ever since 3DMark’99 was released nearly 7 years back. It runs a series of visual tests and calculates the score based on the framerates achieved. While its objectivity is questionable at times due to its susceptibility to driver optimizations, it’s nevertheless a useful yardstick of comparing graphics performance.



If you look at synthetic theoretical performance, the ASUS boards, as expected, pull ahead of the reference boards when you compare them in both single and dual card configurations. With dual cards in SLi, the performance gain in 3DMark’06 translated to about 75% which is really, quite a lot. As you can see, SLi has matured quite a bit since the Geforce 6800 days, with performance gains more tangible than ever before.

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Call of Duty 2 is the sequel to the best WWII shooter of 2003. It’s also considered a PC slaughterhouse, with its massive texture memory requirements and fancy DirectX9 fueled graphics. We used in-game runs timed by FRAPS to calculate our average FPS. The in-game anisotropic filter option was enabled. The areas of gameplay focus were the more intense firefights which featured tons of nice special effects. We also kept getting killed like silly numbnuts every now and then, so it was a little tedious at times.



At 1280x1024 our boards perform exceptionally well. As expected, the ASUS card easily beat the reference board by a margin of around 10%, however the difference became less pronounced in SLi mode. Furthermore, the gain in SLi mode wasn’t as much as we expected, however the jump from the framerates in the 40’s to beyond the magic 60 FPS barrier and almost bordering at 70 FPS completely redefined our game experience. Prior to this, we were quite used to chugging along at framerates below 50 with single cards at these settings but now SLi has made us quite spoilt. Moving on to 1600x1200, the boards take quite a hit and became slightly sloppy as single cards. However in SLi, they happily churn out framerates in the 50’s, which are perfectly fluid, with the ASUS card still retaining a slightly superficial lead. If you want to play this game at 1600x1200 with all the bells and whistles, then you are going to need two of these video cards.

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Quake 4 is one of the few titles still heralding the OpenGL banner. It’s based on John Carmack’s brilliant Doom3 engine, which features some of the most advanced lighting and shadowing techniques ever seen in a game. Even though it’s OpenGL, Quake 4 also features a horde of fancy graphical effects that are specific to video hardware that is DirectX9 compliant. The beauty of the engine is its ability to scale incredibly well on a wide range of system configurations. It still remains a taxing game at its ‘Ultra Quality’ setting, which eschews any sort of compression and renders the game in its most original form. Enabling ‘Ultra Quality’ also automatically applies the in-game anisotropic filter at 8x.



All we can say is "wow". Given Nvidia’s historically powerful OpenGL shows, our video cards tore through Quake 4 like no tomorrow. The ASUS board still managed to trounce the reference 7900GT in all situations. With SLi, the boards simply laughed and chuckled at Quake 4. Ignore the slightly lower framerates shown in the graphs depicting the move from 1280x1024 to 1600x1200. The change in resolution was completely unnoticeable when it comes to in-game framerates. The CPU limitation is obvious. It was almost impossible for us to crack 125 fps. Our monstrous Athlon64 X2 clocked at 2.62 GHz, could simply not keep up with the framerates the two boards wanted to churn out. In a nutshell, Quake 4 ran like cream.

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F.E.A.R is considered the killer app up until recently, when Oblivion hit the shelves. Nevertheless it has gained the reputation of one gigantic concrete wall called ‘framerate murderer’, and efforts to smash through its barriers have so far proved futile. It's also one of the prettiest looking games released to date, but of course, all that comes at a price. We resolved most of the problems we had previously while benchmarking F.E.A.R. Since it’s inherently impossible to run soft-shadows with anti-aliasing, we chose anti-aliasing, since it provided more tangible gains in image quality with a comparatively lesser impact to performance. We specifically chose a sequence where combat was fairly concentrated, with lots of enemies running around and pretending to be intelligent cannon fodder for your assault rifle.



At 1280x960, with a single card, F.E.A.R was perfectly playable. The ASUS EN7900GT ‘TOP’ managed to maintain a healthy lead over the reference card of around 11%. Switching to SLi, however, dramatically changed the picture. F.E.A.R made particularly good use of SLi, as can be seen from the resultant framerates. The experience was remarkable; since it seems that F.E.A.R’s reputation has finally met a match in SLi. Framerates of 70+ had previously been unheard of at these settings. When we moved to 1600x1200, F.E.A.R took a counter offensive at our video cards. While in single configuration the ASUS card still managed to take a small lead and hold its own, the average framerates in the mid 20’s given F.E.A.R ‘s fast gameplay are nothing to feel special about. The only consolation here is that we tested in a fairly shader heavy situation towards the end of the game, so you could cut these cards some well deserved slack. SLi saved both cards however; pushing their performance to the low 40’s which brought back a reasonable degree of playability on the admittedly overbearing settings. So, if you want to play F.E.A.R with everything maxed out at 1600x1200, go for SLi.


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Need for Speed: Most Wanted is EA’s latest installment in the NFS franchise, and attempts to take the series back to its roots. It features frantic cop chases and a reduced ‘rice’ factor compared to the previous two installments, which were almost entirely built around the pop culture bandwagon. It also brings with it the best graphics ever seen in a PC driving game to date which are quite literally, dizzying. We are rather surprised that few people have noticed how taxing Need for Speed: Most Wanted is on even the most cutting edge of systems and it certainly deserves to be given a bit more attention, especially in the area of benchmarking.



The tested cards did fairly well in single card mode at 1280x1024. The ASUS card maintained its usual lead over the reference board. The difference became almost non-existent in SLi mode however. Furthermore, NFS: Most Wanted did not seem to be using SLi particularly as effectively as other games we tested. The comparative gain was no where as pronounced. The gain was quite noticeable during gameplay however, easily breaking the 60 FPS barrier which is more than enough for any driving game. We suspect that the low SLi scaling issue could either be a CPU limitation or a problem with the game itself, since the Nvidia has really worked hard on its SLi performance and the chances of it being a driver issue are rather slim. The move to 1600x1200 retained playability in single card mode, with the ASUS card in SLi setup providing a fine experience with framerates hovering in the min 50’s. There was an occasional spike in either direction every now and then, but not enough to detract from gameplay.

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The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is the latest chapter from Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls universe. The archetypical RPG based around free form gameplay, Oblivion is definitely a game worthy of anyone’s hard drive, provided they have the time. When it comes to graphics, Oblivion takes the visual crown. Forget about all those nature and foliage tech demos we used to see in the days of yore. Oblivion has it for real. Forget F.E.A.R or Call of Duty 2’s tendency to ‘slaughter’ PC’s as well. Oblivion redefines ‘slaughterhouse’ and makes everything else obsolete. Its perhaps one of the first mainstream titles which requires a DX9 level card as a minimum to run it out of the box, which gives a fair idea of where the future is heading to. In summary, Oblivion, has some of the finest visuals ever seen in a PC game to date.

Testing Oblivion was a tedious, but fun experience. Our initial concern was to decide what game configuration to use. Since the focus was on out of the box performance, we first reset our tweaked ini files to defaults. We also removed all mods before our testing, including the distance LOD textures and normal map replacements, since we feared that they might end up reducing consistency in our results due to potentially higher texture swapping. All in-game settings were set to the max, with the exception of a few that make almost no visual impact to the game and tweaking them might potentially help us in gaining a few vital frames per second. Item fade was set to 50%, self shadowing was disabled and shadow filtering was set to low.

One particular point of note was our anisotropic filtering setting in the drivers. High levels of filtering had a ridiculously large impact on performance, particularly in foliage where 16xAF just about bled our framerates to death. As luck would have it, foliage is one of the few areas were anisotropic filtering is least required. Finally we had to settle for 8xAF, in order to maintain adequate framerates in the wilderness and keeping visuals in areas such as cities to a decent level.

Unlike other first person games which chuck you in a small level like a rat in a maze, Oblivion puts you in a huge open game world which the developers claim measures around 16² miles. The grid based world is divided into ‘cells’ and as you travel there might be small, sporadic pauses as you transition between these cells. Just to ensure consistency we had to repeat our FRAP’s runs more times than in any other game tested. Our run consisted of a ‘panic sprint’ from a bare mountain top near Bruma, skirting the city, then traveling south-west to Chorrol, passing through lush forests and then finally ending south of Chorrol at a creepy little village called Hack Dirt. While it sounds like an insanely long trip, our level 45 Dunmer didn’t break too much of a sweat. He still spared the time to stop every now and then to give the occasional Ogre or Spriggan the opportunity to taste some Goldbrand and lick some Umbra. =)


High Dynamic Range lighting…



First off, we tested using HDR. Anti-aliasing is currently not supported with Nvidia cards while using HDR. (You can of course guess the ludicrously low framerates that you might get with HDR+AA on these cards) At 1280x1024, the single board from ASUS managed to edge out the reference board. The framerates are still quite poor, so it’s really irrelevant. You really might want to reduce anisotropic filtering and tweak out the game a bit to get higher framerates on a single 7900GT. With SLi, the picture changed dramatically. The difference was like night and day. However do note at this point, while personal preference for playable framerates varies, Oblivion isn’t exactly Quake or UT where you need a constant 100+ frames per second to keep your pacemakers ticking. Oblivion provides a perfect experience as long as your framerate is reasonably stable and hangs around 30 FPS. 35-40 FPS is nirvana, at least by Oblivion's standards. The move to 1600x1200 was signified by both cards taking a big dump. Oblivion was simply not playable at 1600x1200 with HDR on single cards. However, while paired with another card, they managed to somewhat save their hide and provided an experience that was surprisingly, borderline playable given the ridiculous torture test we had just subjected them to. Bottom line – If you want to play Oblivion at insanely high settings in HDR goodness, you need SLi.


Bloom & anti-aliasing…



Oblivion also gives you the opportunity to use anti-aliasing with bloom, which is basically a blur shader that gives the world a slight ‘dreamy’ look with a bit of HDR-like vibrance. Bloom can also be tweaked to look a bit more like HDR while being much less strenous on your graphics subsystem. The impact of bloom alone really shouldnt bother most modern video cards at all. At 1280x1024, the ASUS card managed to take its usual lead, though the framerates were still a bit low. In SLi mode, it really became a remarkable experience, with the ASUS EN-7900GT 'TOP' happily cruising in the mid 40’s. The move to 1600x1200 bought a similar performance loss for the single cards but it was no where as terrible as the one we had with HDR. In SLi mode, they retained playability; however the ASUS board this time around managed to crack the 30 FPS barrier, which in our opinion is remarkable. If you have a single card, then you might want to reduce your AA and AF levels to get slightly better framerates. If you have SLi, just enjoy the game.

Finally, given the current state of hardware, it should suffice to say that to get the best out of Oblivion; you need two cards running in SLi.

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Benchmark Summary

The cards were intentionally stressed in our testing scenarios, but still managed to hold their own. Since we deliberately attempted to simulate the worst case scenarios, we are sure they will maintain a great level of performance in most gaming situations.

The ASUS EN7900GT ‘TOP’ maintained an all round lead over the reference 7900GT in every scenario tested. The lead varied from being miniscule to being perfectly representative of its higher clock speeds. In a couple of cases it was noticeably faster. In SLi mode both of them ran almost neck and neck, with the exception of a few situations where the ASUS EN7900GT 'TOP' took a larger lead. The less pronounced performance gap with SLi could also indicate a possible CPU limitation.

Excluding NFS: Most Wanted, all other games scaled reasonably well with SLi. In particular, Oblivion and F.E.A.R scaled very well, with Oblivion figuratively making SLi a necessity. Each game told its own story. Call of Duty 2 became an amazing experience with SLi, while Quake IV was shredded to bits. It should suffice to say that the ASUS EN7900GT 'TOP' is an outrageously powerful video card for its price and when paired in SLi mode, will put your computer on steroids. You get some serious horsepower with SLi. Last but not least, we will also advise you guys to always keep your head down in Call of Duty 2.

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Overclocking, Temperatures and Power Consumption

Overclocking results are usually subjective, inconclusive and your own mileage will always vary. Furthermore, overclocking will reduce the life of your hardware and always attempt it at your own risk. Of course, since these are ‘TOP’ Edition cards and rated higher than ordinary 7900GT’s we just had to push them to their limits.

Using the NVIDIA overclocking panel (enabled with the Coolbits registry tweak), we took on the core first. First we tested successfully at 540MHz. Along came 550, then 560 until it finally looked that our core wouldn’t go beyond 580MHz. We then set it to a more prudent 570MHz for some testing. Coming to the memory, we initially bumped it suddenly to 1640 MHz and it seemed perfectly happy. That’s 200MHz over the ASUS EN7900GT-TOP’s default clocks. Inclined to push it further, we finally arrived at artifact free overclocked goodness at 1680 MHz. Our ASUS EN7900GT ‘TOP’ SLi setup was now running at 570/1680, which is quite a jump from its default clocks of 520/1440 and a substantial leap ahead of the reference 7900GT clocking in at 450/1320.

The setup was rock stable at these overclocked speeds. We ran a few 3DMark’06 runs just to check the possible gain in performance the overclocking might yield and the results speak for themselves. The single card score may actually give the Geforce 7900GTX a run for its money. The ASUS EN7900GT-'TOP' appears to be built for overclocking.



It’s pretty hot in Pakistan these days. It’s next to impossible getting a good nights sleep without an air conditioner blowing full blast. Gaming setups suffer to a large degree thanks to our notorious summers. Our SLi setup usually idled from the high 40’s to the low 50’s depending on time of day and outside ambient temperature. On load, the cards registered 69°c, which is remarkably cool given the circumstances. It also speaks volumes about the effectiveness of the ASUS EN-7900GT ‘TOP’ Edition’s cooler. In comparison, our reference board equipped with that tiny fan was hitting 75°c during load. Do note however, if you have two cards in SLi, you require a good case cooling setup with better than normal airflow. Simply put, two cards will generate a lot of heat and if you don’t do anything about it, then expect the worst.

Does Ruby look jealous? Green with NV, green is cool =P…


7900GT’s are not too watt hungry when it comes to single card configurations, so you can ease yourself if you have an adequate power supply unit with some decent amps on the +12v rail. SLi does come with a caveat however. You will need a high quality SLi certified power supply from a well known brand. This is especially of concern in Pakistan, where the summers are known to take their gratuitous toll on PSU’s. Generic PSU’s, regardless of what their stickers declare are a big NO. If you are spending upwards of $600 on your video cards then you are also expected to invest in some heavy stuff that will juice it.

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So how does it all add up?

The ASUS EN7900GT ‘TOP’ is an amazing piece of kit. It is obviously faster than ordinary 7900GT's in all circumstances. The card is almost noiseless, runs quite cool, consumes a comparatively low amount of power and yet manages to deliver in almost every situation you might choose put it through...and yes, it's a champion overclocker too.

When the ASUS EN-7900GT 'TOP' is SLi’ed, things even get better. For just about 20% more 'investment' than a single Geforce 7900GTX you are looking at performance that will simply blow the Geforce 7900GTX out of its skin. SLi has matured a lot from the state it was in short time ago and will continue to improve. Yes, SLi might be a more cumbersome option compared to a single card set up, but when it comes to SLi delivering what it says, we really shouldn’t be complaining anymore.

Finally, the most important question of all, does the ASUS EN-7900GT 'TOP' deliver ‘value’? It isn’t exactly a budget card by any standards and considering that it’s from ASUS, it’s bound to be pricey. It will likely be beyond the reach of most individuals who slave for months collecting their pocket money to buy those unreachable framerates. Competitive pricing and availability are also deciding factors over here; however the simple fact that ASUS offers a three year warranty compared to the measly ten or twelve month coverage most local distributors’ offer for competing brands changes the whole picture. Rest assured it will be money well spent.

DirectX 10 is just around the corner, so that makes these babies powerful in their own right, representing a fading breed of some of the most powerful DirectX 9 video cards in the world. They are not exactly the ‘fastest’ when it comes to performance, but when it comes to value and efficiency, they certainly want to please and it shows.


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The ‘good’:
Great value.

Exceptional stability and build quality.

Good cooling setup.

Faster than ordinary 7900GT’s.

Three year warranty.


The ‘bad’:
Cosmetically, ASUS could have put a little more effort into really making the card visually stand out.

Pricey compared to ordinary 7900GT’s

Rare.

Based on stellar value, great performance and exceptional quality we rate the ASUS EN7900GT 'TOP' at...
9.1/10

After much consideration, we finally came to a conclusion with the ASUS EN-7900GT ‘TOP’ Edition. Considering the punch it delivers and the way it delivers that punch, we are more than proud to hand out our first 'Editor's Choice' award. Rock on.



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For pricing and availability, please check the vendor threads in our ‘classifieds’ forum.

SPECIAL THANKS TO ASUS-PK for providing the samples for review and evaluation.










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