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ASUS Extreme N7800 GT TOP 256MB Silent Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Wednesday, 05 April 2006 |
HotHardware comes with a review on the ASUS Extreme N7800 GT TOP 256MB Silent video card. Silent computing and overclocking are two topics that tend to be mutually exclusive. Typically, when you overclock something, like a graphics card for example, it needs more cooling, which in turn means higher fan speeds and more noise. Luckily though, there are some companies that disregard these notions and give us both lower noise and increased performance. The company in the spotlight today for doing just that is ASUS. The product getting the attention is the Extreme N7800 GT TOP Silent, which is based on the NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT GPU.
 ASUS Extreme N7800 GT TOP 256MB Silent Review
As you can guess by the name, this is a totally silent card thanks to innovative passive cooling. And contrary to what you may think, it's also factory overclocked. Even though the GeForce 7800 GT has been out for quite some time now, we were still excited about checking out this unique variant of the popular card. First off, ASUS bumped up the core clock from 400MHz to 420MHz. Stopping there would be too easy though, so ASUS also decided to use 1.6ns GDDR3 chips instead of the standard 2.0ns chips. The 1.6ns Samsung chips are rated at 1200MHz, but ASUS went ahead and bumped them up to 1240MHz.
We were very pleased with the Extreme N7800 GT TOP Silent's performance. The card should outperform all reference GeForce 7800 GT's and it can do so silently. The factory overclock definitely helps put it above your average GeForce 7800 GT and Radeon X1800 XL. Overclocked GeForce 7800 GT's and Radeon X1800 XL's would be able to hang with the Extreme N7800 GT TOP Silent in the performance department, however, but they most likely won't be passively coooled. We're happy to see such a high-end silent card hit the market, but it seems to be very scarce right now.
After checking several of the largest online retailers and even some smaller ones too, we didn't find the Extreme N7800 GT TOP Silent available anywhere. Part of the reason for lack of availability must be due to the market presence of the superior GeForce 7900 GT. It would be great to see ASUS follow up soon with an Extreme N7900 GT TOP Silent. We are crossing our fingers for now. If you want the best silent 3D performance available without water cooling, then this is your card.
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