ASUS EN8800GTX Aquatank - More basics
Author: Luka Rakamaric
Date: 15 Apr 2007

Users with a lot of cards need to be careful, since the Aquatank uses four (4) slots to fit into the chassis. You can forget about SLI, and you can forget about various TV tuners, standalone audio cards or drive controllers. This card is meant for a gaming PC with nothing else in it. The pump/reservoir/radiator part fits into a PCI slot, and is fixed by screws on the back panel, just like a normal graphics card.

Since we have been handling 8800 series cards for almost six months now, in the absence of a big air cooler, the card itself looks a little empty and the cooler tiny, but then you follow the rubber tubes to their other end and find a 8800GTS sized cooler that explains pretty well why this cools the card by approximately 25 degrees lower than the stock cooler.

Our standard testbed for graphics cards was used in this review as well:
- Intel Core 2 Duo E6700
- EVGA 680i SLI motherboard
- OCZ PC2-8500 SLI, 2x1 GB
- Western Digital Raptor X, 150 GB
- OCZ GameXstream 850W

Everybody is making a switch to LCD screens, and when you cross the 19" limit, almost all models are wide screen, so we decided to sack the 1600x1200 resolution in our benchmarks. We feel that it is a CRT resolution, and decided to replace it with 1920x1200, which is used on 22" + LCD screens. So from now on, we will only benchmark three resolutions: 1280x1024, 1920x1200 and 2560x1600. The same modes are still here, 4xAA/16xAF, 8xQAA/16xAF and 16xQAA/16xAF. Since Riddick has been giving us problems with the new drivers, we also removed it from the batch of benchmarks.

3DMark benchmarks were run at their default resolutions, 1024x768 for 3DMark05 and 1280x1024 for 3DMark06. All the games had every option maxed out, to put maximum strain on the GPU and limit the CPU?s involvement in the results. Unfortunately, with the introduction of CSAA 16x mode in 8800 series, 16x AA doesn?t eat as much processing power, so on the smallest resolution, there is some CPU limitation on this card. We are, however, almost certain that potential buyers of this card are planning to use it with 1280x1024 or lower resolutions.