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Asus ENGTX285 Top
Gone are the days when it was up to the enthusiast to squeeze more performance from his graphics card. Manufacturers have been targeting that segment of the market that demands more than just stock speeds. Since manufacturers have been doing this, Asus has happily been releasing cards clocked higher than the stock speeds, with varying results and successes.
Even though the ENGTX285 TOP uses a reference cooler design, the card runs cool. Thankfully it will not burn your hands like the HD4870 and HD4870X2 do.
With the launch of the GTX285 and GTX295 still fresh in our memory, we were keen to see the performance that this slight overclock could achieve. Asus' TOP cards are great cards and while the speed increases appear to be small, they do yield some exciting results.
Asus have pumped up the clock speed by 22MHz, the memory clock by 58MHz and the shader clock by 74MHz. These figures might not seem that remarkable but considering that the reference cooler has a limit and Asus managed to stick within the 183w TDP they're not too bad.
The performance of the ENGTX285 TOP is remarkable - it is almost on a par with the GTX295. Amazing considering the price difference between the GTX295 and the ENGTX285 TOP. The Far Cry 2 benchmark is new to our battery of tests; it features the next gen game engine Dunia and provides an extremely realistic environment.
While Crysis still manages to really push the abilities of any card, Far Cry 2 shows us what you can expect from the ENGTX285 TOP with a very well optimized game code. We used the Ultra High setting to determine the full grunt of the card. Anything lower would be showing a bit of mercy. The results are impressive to say the least.
At Ultra High with 4x Anti-aliasing the frame rate was a very playable 53 fps. Crysis results were a bit more sombre, but not bad considering how the ENGTX285 TOP's results compare to the GTX295. However, one must remember that the Crysis engine does not fully support multiple GPUs.
The Asus ENGTX285 TOP is an excellent card, especially since its price is only $50 more than a standard GTX285. If you are looking for more bang for your buck, there is no doubt that the ENGTX285 TOP will deliver. However, you will find that Asus have already squeezed all the juice they can out of this card - trying to get more will not be worth the effort as there is almost no headroom. Nvidia's latest architecture has proven itself against the competition, but now we see that it is capable of just a bit more.
However, the overclocks on this card are so close to the stock speeds that it is very much a reality that even an amateur overclocker could squeeze these performance figures out of a stock card. Pre-overclocked cards present those without the bravery to overclock the opportunity to get that extra performance as well as a nice warranty to go with it.
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