ASUS EN8600GTS TOP (Top Overclocking Performance) leaves other Geforce 8600GTS cards behind.

Introduction

While AMD-ATI are struggling to cope with the aftermath of their aquisition, Nvidia have gone full steam ahead ... dominating the graphics card market at every turn. First there was the Geforce 8800 series and now the 8600 series. Both support DirectX 10 and Windows Vista.

Delays after delays have forced AMD-ATI to hold back their inital release of the R600 GPU, now named Radeon HD 2900XTX. Even still, there have been reports that preliminary tests have given poor results against Nvidia's current flagship 8800GTX. Unless AMD-ATI come up with something extraordinary this year, I think it might be a little bit too late for them to play catch-up.

       

For now, Nvidia is the brand name that's on everyone's minds. To cater the needs of the consumer, manufacturers such as Asus, Gigabyte and Foxconn are starting release their new graphic cards based on Nvidia's Geforce 8600 series. We've already taken a look at MSI's NX8600GT which utilises the Geforce 8600GT (G84-300) GPU. In this review however, we'll be taking a look at Asus's EN8600GTS TOP which uses the more powerful Geforce 8600GTS (G84-400) GPU. This time however, Asus has added something a little extra ... TOP (Top Overclocking Performance).

       

The Asus EN8600GTS TOP uses Nvidia's G84-400 GPU with an overclocked core clocked at 745Mhz, while the 256Mb of DDR3 ram runs at 800MHz (1600MHz effective). It's a graphics card aimed at the cost conscience gamer who wants good performance at the right price. As I've said before, NOT everyone can afford a high-end graphics card for gaming. The 8800GTS/GTX is really out of reach for many users who consider themselves as the occasional gamer. And for this reason the Geforce 8600GTS would appeal to the majority of users ... me included.

 

Future Mark, the company behind PCMark05, 3DMark05 and 3DMark06 have said in an official press release, that their next benchmarking software will be DirectX 10 only. With this news ... I can see over the next few months, graphic cards based on the Geforce 8800 and 8600 series selling really well.

Right then, let's see what the Asus EN8600GTS TOP has to offer in terms of performance and features.