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ASUS Extreme N7900 GT TOP 256MB PCI-E Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Tuesday, 20 June 2006 |
GamePyre comes with a review on the ASUS Extreme N7900 GT TOP 256MB PCIe graphics card. ASUS manufactures motherboards, video cards and other computer components. They are one of the companies that manufacture video cards on both NVIDIA and ATI video chips. Early this year NVIDIA introduced the GeForce 7900 chip. The GeForce 7900 GT is the mainstream high-end chip and has been very successful for NVIDIA. ASUS decided to use a rather plain looking PCB on their GeForce 7900 GT. The card is not much longer than a PCI Express slot, allowing it to fit into virtually any case. The Extreme N7900 GT uses a single slot cooling solution, unlike its bigger brother the Extreme N7900 GTX which requires a two slot cooling to run.
 ASUS Extreme N7900 GT TOP 256MB PCI-E Review
ASUS is bundling King Kong with virtually every video card they sell today, and they slapped a picture of King Kong on the heatsink. There are 2ns memory chips on the front of the card, meaning that ASUS outfitted the Extrme N7900 GT with 256MB of GDDR3 memory. Virtually every video card released today is on the PCI Express bus, which replaced the AGP standard. Early NVIDIA cards required a bridge chip to run on a PCI Express system. The GeForce 7900 GT also requires more than the 75W of power the PCI Express bus provides and there is a power connector on the card to provide the extra power.
The GeForce 7900 GT is one of NVIDIA's first chips to operate on the 90 nanometer process. NVIDIA decided to lower the power requirements and transistor counts from their previous card, the GeForce 7800 GTX. Microsoft is due to release the Vista operating system early next year, along with Shader Model 4.0. In the meantime, all current video cards support Shader Model 3.0 including the GeForce 7900 GT. One of the advantages of NVIDIA cards of the last few generations has been the ability to use two video cards to run simultaneously to improve performance in games, via SLI technology.
ASUS's card is clocked at 520MHz for the core clock and 1440MHz for the memory effective. This is a 70MHz overclock for the core and 120MHz overclock for the memory compared to NVIDIA's reference card clocks. One thing to keep in mind when doing SLI mode is the clock speeds will be clocked at the lower card speed when a different card is utilized with this one. The ASUS Extreme N7900 GT is one of the best of its breed, the GeForce 7900 GT. There are faster clocked GeForce 7900 GT's from XFX and EVGA, but there have been reports of problems with some of those overclocked versions.
I had no issues with stability and artifacts with the ASUS card, and frankly, the GeForce 7900 GT with a 520/1440MHz clock speed is fast enough for everyone but the totally crazy, and those people would want the GeForce 7900 GTX or GX2, or an ATI Radeon X1900 XTX card, costing more money. The bang for the buck tradeoff on the ASUS Extreme N7900 GT is excellent. At a MSRP of $299 the Extreme N7900 GT TOP can hold its own with the latest games and is ready for today's demanding applications. The next iteration of Microsoft operating systems, Vista comes later this year.
Vista will bring a new GUI called Windows Aero Glass. The GeForce 7900 GT and other Shader Model 3.0 parts are fully ready for the new GUI. Vista will also bring the next iteration of Direct3D. This will introduce Shader Model 4.0. It's likely that NVIDIA and ATI will announce new video cards to support Shader Model 4.0 before Vista reaches the masses, but we'll have to wait and see.
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