ASUS EN8800GTS 320MB

Imagine an 8800GTS. Now halve the memory. The result is not at all like your grandmother.

NVIDIA will soon announce the lower end of its 8x00 family in the form of the 8500 GT, 8600 GT and 8600 GTS, but until then the budget-minded have this little rocket to rely on for performance in DirectX 10.

The EN8800GTS 320MB is just that – an 8800 GTS that’s had its memory halved. Unlike your grandmother this doesn’t mean it’ll forget things and start spilling yoghurt everywhere after a particularly hectic bingo session – just that it won’t be able to handle ultra-sized textures or AA modes at high resolutions in games like Oblivion or Quake 4 as well as its better endowed brother. In everything else – heat, noise, size, stream processors – it’s exactly the same. For those who have 22" monitors and below and are willing to sacrifice a little bit of texture detail, then this card should fit nicely.

In slightly older games with not so huge textures, it performs exactly the same as the 640MB – 3DMark06 coughing up 2563, 2005 and 1634 at 1280 x 1024, 1600 x 1200 and 1920 x 1200 respectively. Similarly, Half-Life 2 gave 160.43fps, 135.54fps and 120.67fps at the same resolutions.

More taxing games such as Oblivion broke out the differences though, with the 320MB’s 71.61fps, 51.37fps, 38.13fps not matching the 640MB’s 72.54fps, 58.27fps and 47.26fps in 1280 x 1024, 1600 x 1200 and 1920 x 1200 respectively. It’s still a small difference, and most gamers won’t care.

ASUS has even managed to be reasonably price competitive, while throwing in a copy of Ghost Recon: Advanced War Fighter, 3DMark06 Professional and a small leather CD wallet to boot, all packaged in their novelty-sized box along with the usual DVI-to-D-Sub dongles and power adaptors.

While it’s not suitable for running the newest super high performance games with insanely sized textures at crazy resolutions by pure virtue of its lower memory count, in terms of DirectX 10 this should keep the mainstream gamer pretty happy for some time indeed.