X-bit labs

The Fast and The Quiet: ASUS 7800GT Top Silent /2HDTV Review

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Zahhar Kirillov

[ 05/21/2006 | 10:24 PM ]

Today we are going to introduce to you a graphics card from ASUS based on Nvidia GeForce 7800 GT and equipped with their own patented passive cooling system aka SilentCool. Let’s try to find out if they managed to create a truly high-end and silent graphics solution. Read our review for details!

Table of contents:

• Package and Accessories
  
• PCB Design
  
• Cooling System
  
• Noise, Overclocking and 2D Quality
  
• Testbed and Methods
  
• Performance in First-Person 3D Shooters
  
• Battlefield 2
  
• The Chronicles of Riddick
  
• Call of Duty 2
  
• Doom 3
  
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
  
• Far Cry
  
• F.E.A.R.
  
• Half-Life 2
  
• Half-Life 2: Lost Coast
  
• Project: Snowblind
  
• Quake 4
  
• Serious Sam 2
  
• Performance in Third-Person 3D Shooters
  
• Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory
  
• Performance in Simulators
  
• Pacific Fighters
  
• X3: Reunion
  
• Performance in Strategies
  
• Age of Empires 3
  
• Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War
  
• Performance in Synthetic Benchmarks
  
• Futuremark 3DMark05 build 1.2.0
  
• Futuremark 3DMark06 build 1.0.2
  
• Conclusion
  

The word Top in the model name indicates an unusual graphics card. Following an established tradition, ASUS puts this name on “advanced” versions of ordinary cards that work at increased frequencies, come with gorgeous accessories and often incorporate original technical solutions.

We can recall EAX1800XT Top and Extreme N7800GTX Top models as Top series cards from ASUS that we had a chance to test in our labs. Both those models got our praises for their excellent performance and impressive contents of the box, yet the Top series has always had either of two drawbacks – high power consumption or a large cooler. What do we have this time around?

This time ASUS has come up with something different and made its patent-pending passive cooling solution SilentCool the main feature of the new graphics card. For the user it means that the graphics card is absolutely noiseless and you can also be sure that it will never be damaged due to a fan failure. PC enthusiasts whose computers are working all day long are sure to appreciate SilentCool since silence is important for such operation mode (and it is this category of users that the ASUS GeForce 7800GT Top is mainly intended for as the manufacturer clearly states in the product specs).

Otherwise this graphics card is a typical pre-overclocked GeForce 7800 GT. It is based on the 0.11-micron G70 chip that has 7 vertex and 20 pixel processors and carries 256 megabytes of GDDR3 memory on board. The Top model has higher core and memory frequencies than the ordinary version (420MHz against 400MHz core and 1.28GHz against 1GHz memory) and has a higher memory access time (1.6ns against 2.0ns). You are going to see shortly how well these characteristics mix with passive cooling.