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ASUS Extreme N7900 GT TOP 256MB PCI-E Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Saturday, 29 April 2006 |
GD Hardware shares with us a review on the ASUS Extreme N7900 GT TOP 256MB PCIe graphics card. If there's one thing that'll float the boat of a hardware enthusiast it's when hardware manufacturers find a way to bring kick-ass performance into the price of the more mainstream budget and NVIDIA's GeForce 7900 GT fits that bill quite nicely. It offers the exact same GPU as the GeForce 7900 GTX, 24 pixel pipelines just with a lower clock rate on the chip and RAM as well as 256MB. The performance delta between the two GPU's isn't extremely huge and the price difference goes a long way to making it a very attractive package.
 ASUS Extreme N7900 GT TOP 256MB PCI-E Review
ASUS jumped all over this GPU and stepped things up a notch by dawning it with their TOP billing. This means, that what you have is a card that comes out of the box with a faster than stock clock rate that crushes similar cards which aren't clocked as high. Priced at around the $350 dollar mark, the ASUS Extreme N7900 GT TOP edition comes clocked at 520MHz core on the GPU and 1440MHz for the memory speed. Top this off with a 256-bit memory interface and you have the makings for a card that provides best-of-class performance in its category.
Additionally, because NVIDIA went to a 90 nanometer process for its manufacturing of the GPU, the card consumes less power and thus putting out less heat than its predecessor; the GeForce 7800 GT. The only real spin ASUS puts on the design of this card is the cooler which features a mug-shot of King Kong, which is also the game included in the box. I'm not quite sure why ASUS thinks that King Kong is a good enough game to market in cards like this as I'm pretty sure the kind of customers who'd pay for it will not be getting hard-core into such a mediocre game.
The numbers in our scores play out just as we expected, not a huge dip below the GTX version. Incredible performance for the money in our opinion. No question here that the Extreme N7900 GT TOP from ASUS would do any gamer proud in regards to overall performance and should highly be considered when you're looking to shell out around $350 dollars for a graphics card. There are cheaper cards for sure, but we feel this is a better overall value and is easily a better pick than what we've seen from ATI in its price range.
ASUS backs this card with a 3-year warranty which we feel isn't bad, but we'd like to see them move that to at least 5-years. Still, it's not the lifetime we've seen from other add-in board companies like BFG. All in all, we’re very happy with this card and have no hesitation whatsoever in recommending it to any gamer out there.
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