Asus ENGTX275 Review

ccokeman - July 9, 2009
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Testing:

Testing the ASUS ENGTX275 will consist of running the card through the Overclockersclub.com suite of games and synthetic benchmarks and comparing it against many popular competitors to gauge its performance. The games used are some of today's popular titles to give you an idea on how the cards perform relative to each other. The system specifications will remain the same throughout the testing. No adjustment will be made to the respective control panels during the testing with the exception of the 3DMark Vantage testing where Physx will be disabled in the nVidia control panel. I will test the ENGTX275 at both stock speeds and then overclocked to see how much additional performance is available when you choose to overclock the card. Comparisons will be made against the performance of its contemporaries on both sides of the fence.

Processor: Intel Core I7 920 150x20
Motherboard: MSI X58 Eclipse SLI
Memory: Mushkin HP3 12800 7-7-7-20
Video Card(s): ASUS ENGTX275
Power Supply: Mushkin 800 watt Modular power supply
Hard Drive: 1 x Seagate 1TB SATA
Optical Drive: NEC DV5700
OS: Windows Vista Ultimate Edition SP1 64-bit
Case: Thermaltake Armor +

Comparison Video Cards:

Overclocking:

Overclocked settings:

ASUS ENGTX275 731/1525/1306

To get the most out of any video card, you have to keep it cool! With that rule in mind and not having an LN2 pot hanging around, the only option I had was to increase the fan speed to 100% to keep the ENGTX275 as cool as possible during testing. After bumping the fan speed up, I started by pushing the GPU core up in 20MHz steps until it would lock up in testing. I followed suit with the shaders and memory to find their limits. Once the limits were found, it was a matter of getting the three parameters to work together. I ended up with solid increases on all three speeds. 731MHz on the core is a 98MHz increase over the stock 633MHz. The shaders offered a bump of 124MHz and the memory was the big winner with a huge bump of 172MHz. This overclock delivered solid increases in performance allowing this card to deliver performance almost equal to that of the ENGTX285 TOP, a factory overclocked card also from ASUS.