ASUS EN6800GT DUAL

Not one to be caught with its pants down, ASUS has attempted to trump Gigabyte's 3D1 dual-6600GT-GPU card by coming out with an incommensurably larger card, sporting two 6800GTs that will work on any SLI motherboard. As such, this manifestation of extreme massiveness comes packing 32 pixel pipelines, 12 vertex shaders and the requirement that both GPUs have their own power. Exactly like any other 6800GT SLI setup, with the same standard clock speeds, only the package is a whole lot bigger.

Almost touching motherboard proportions, it measures 17.5cm by 31.2cm, hits the scales in at 930 grams, and is without a doubt the largest video card we have ever laid eyes on, flooring even the short-lived 3DFX Voodoo 5 5500. Considering its slightly expansive size, fitting it in a case could prove to be a hassle. Firstly, it uses two expansion slots, but that's hardly different from most of today's enthusiasts cards, although this may take away some advantage of having one SLI card over two (though SLI takes up three slots). Secondly, its length is almost identical to that of a standard ATX mobo, which means if you have a case in which the motherboard's width neatly finishes at or close to the drive bay area, this card simply will not fit -- and that's a large majority of cases. Finally, the width of this card is so great that it ends up almost touching the side of the case, or in some situations, beyond it. Basically what we're saying is some serious case hacking may be required to get this in your system.

And damn, that's a whole lot of card!

Getting to the grunt, it's damn loud. On the PCB, parts are far and sparse and this certainly helps keep the heat spread-out, and when performing basic 2D functions, the fan noise was acceptably quiet. However, when it comes to 3D, you just might want a pair of ear-plugs, as it really knows how to ramp up the decibels, with a scream sounding much like a Dremel. It certainly cools effectively, but that comes with a price. Those unafraid of water would probably do best to pry this loud cooler off and pop on two water cooling blocks.

Capable of running on any SLI capable motherboard with a x16 slot, the mode in which the PCI-Express slot operates in should be set to 'single'. This way each GPU essentially has access to its own x8 bus.

For testing we used an nForce4 SLI board with 512MB of DDR400 RAM and an Athlon 64 3500+. Going up against a pair of significantly-quieter-yet-more-separated 6800GTs, they performed roughly the same in Doom 3, Demo1. But not on the infamous 'first load' (when a Doom 3 timedemo is first run, not all the textures are properly loaded into memory), with the separate GTs scoring 70.5fps and the EN6800GT DUAL spitting out 77fps. This is closer to real-world performance and shows this mega-beast can perform slightly better than a standard otherwise-identical setup. This gap dramatically closes on 3DMark05, with merely ten marks worth of difference, showing the true nature of what these chips are capable of. wtih the same amount of pipelines and same clock speeds, the results were to be expected.

The decision between one of these mean beasts and a two-card setup will, for the large part, come down to pricing -- something of which was not yet available at the time of writing. That said, this is most certainly a powerful card and doesn't fail to impress.

Overall, it's very big, very niche and curiously arousing. We never thought we'd see something of this calibre again, but this will surely go down in history as a powerful, bad-arse card.