ASUS ENGTX295 [Review]

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ASUS ENGTX295 [Review]

Jayesh Limaye, Feb 03, 2009 1456 hrs IST

Based on the fastest single graphics solution available today, this card is a trailblazer

Extremely fast, nice build and HSF, SLI, based on 55nm fabrication process, lower power consumption than competition, good software bundle.

Cannot be overclocked much, a bit expensive, power hungry in 3D, no integrated audio, no game bundle, no HDMI cable.

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Pricing

The card is available at an insanely high price of Rs.39,250 and comes with a three-year warranty. The price is simply over the top, since this is not an overclocked card, nor does it come with a noteworthy bundle. You can get a graphics card based on this chipset from other manufacturers such as Zotac, at five thousand rupees less, and they perform just as good, so the extra money doesn't make any sense.

Verdict

The ASUS ENGTX295 is a terrific performer is able to just rip through whatever game you try to play on it at whatever resolutions and at whatever settings. We found that playing games at the highest resolution supported by our monitor, i.e. 1920x1440 does not pose any challenge to this card and this is well over the Full HD resolution of 1920x1080, which is available on the largest LCD monitors available in India today. The card can be moderately overclocked and the performance gain is around five percent.

Being an NVIDIA card, it supports PhysX and it can do it in SLI mode as well, since there are two GPUs involved. You should expect a better gaming experience with games that support this API. Whether you like it or not, an increasing number of games support PhysX and even though it sounds that things are biased towards NVIDIA, it is ATI which is not supporting this API, even though NVIDIA has offered it for free and losing out on certain things while NVIDIA continues to capitalize.

With Windows 7 having DirectX 11, GPGPU applications will gain prominence and the massive parallel processing available in this processor will begin to show. CUDA is at present allowing just that on older operating systems and lets the card handle GPGPU applications such as Folding@home.

The price of Rs.39,250 seems too high when you consider the fact that it doesn't come with a noteworthy bundle and ASUS did not even provide an HDMI cable. Competing manufacturers offer cards based on this single most powerful GPU today for around five thousand rupees less.