ASUS EN8800GTX AquaTank

We have tested a large number of GeForce 8800GTS and GTX cards for our magazine recently in an effort to try and find the fastest GeForce card on the market today. A card we really wanted to test but did not arrive in our labs on time for this test is the EN8800GTX AquaTank by ASUS. This card has Watercooling as standard and ASUS claims that this model is faster than any other GeForce 8800 card in the shops. A bold statement that we just had to test for accuracy.

The EN8800GTX AquaTank is based on a standard GeForce 8800 GTX as we have already reviewed a few weeks ago. The original GeForce 8800 GTX review can be found here . ASUS has left the standard cooler for what it was and has implemented a Thermaltake watercooling solution on the card, and as you can see on the pictures the cooler on this card looks very similar to the Thermaltake TideWater, only with a different (Ghost Recon) decal. The biggest advantage to a solution like this is that you do not have to do anything yourself, it is a ready to go product that you can plug straight into your system. The pump, fans and radiator are all on a seperate unit that has to be placed in an empty PCI slot. The disadvantage is that both the card and the seperate unit take two slots, so when you use this card you will lose four PCI (-Express) slots. An SLI setup with two of these cards will be a virtual impossibility.

The GPU has a large copper heatsink, and ASUS has chosen to put a seperate heatsink on all the memory chips as well. As the memory is not cooled by the liquid cooler there is a fan present on the card itself. It is evident that ASUS has designed this card for extra performance and not to make it silent.

The extra module takes up two slots as stated before, and is fed through a normal molex connector from the PSU. On the top of the module is a switch that controls the fan speed between high and low. As there is a nother fan on the graphics card itself we did not really notice any difference in noise levels between the high or low setting. At the back of the module is a small cap where you can fill the reservoir, however as the card comes completely assembled, you will probably never need to refill the reservoir.

Clock frequencies

As we stated on the previous page ASUS has designed this card to get the best possible performance out of the 8800 GTX. The standard clock frequencies are a ot higher than on other GeForce 8800 GTX cards; the GPU operates at 630MHz (standard frequency is 575MHz) and the GDDR3 memory runs at no less than 1030 MHz (standard 900MHz). This does make this the fastest card we have seen factory overclocked to date, both the ACS3 by EVGA and the XXX Edition by XFX have lower standard frequencies.

The frequencies are high to begin with, but we did manage to squeeze more out of the card in our labs, we managed to get the GPU up to 670MHz and the memory up to 1075MHz. This is only slightly over the values we could reach with the other cards tested by XFX and EVGA, so it seems that watercooling can not really unleash a massive overclock potential on both GPU and memory. The Benchmarks do show however that the ASUS EN8800GTX AquaTank clearly is the fastest GeForce 8800 GTX we have tested to date.

Not only the card is special, the software that comes with it is worth mentioning as well; we found a full version of 3D MArk 06 in the box, as well as a full vversion of the games Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter and GTI Racing. When writing this review the card can be found for around £ 500, quite a bit more expensive than the normal variety. The difference with other factory overclocked cards by EVGA and XFX is only around £ 20.

Benchmarks

We tested this card in our normal graphics testbed, consisting of an Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 processor, 1 GB DDR2-800 memory and a ASUS P5W DH motherboard. The following graphs show the benchmark results of the ASUS EN8800GTX AquaTank compared to all the other 8800 GTX and GTS cards we have tested. We ran the 3D Mark 06 benchmark twice; first on the standard frequecies and the second time on the maximum overclocked setting we could reach. i

You can see that the ASUS EN8800GTX AquaTank truly is the fastest GeForce 8800 GTX on the market, when we run on the maximum overclock the card reaches a new record of 11941 points in 3D Mark 06.

Conclusion

The ASUS EN8800GTX AquaTank does what is says on the box, it is the fastest GeForce 8800 GTX we have seen up till now. The statement is a bit over the top though, as the maximum overclocking potential of the card is not that much hgher than that of other factory overclocked GeForce 8800 GTX cards we have tested. On the other hand the price difference between this card and other factory overclocked ones is only small, so if you are looking for a suped up 8800 GTX and have some money spare the Aquatank is definitely the better option.

Click on the prices link under this review to see an up-to-date price check on this card and a complete overview of the specifications of the ASUS EN8800GTX AquaTank.

ASUS EN8800GTX AquaTank