ASUS ENGTX480/2DI/1536MD5 Pro Reviews

Given its enthusiast-grade retail price of around $535 CDN ($510 USD, £350 GBP) , the ASUS ENGTX480-2D1-1536 videocard is simply too much of a compromise for all but the most die-hard NVIDIA fan. In the future its saving grace may come in the form of application developers embracing CUDA/GPGPU and game developers getting the most out of the GF100 "Fermi" GPU's tesselator.

In conclusion, the early GeForce GTX 480 engineering samples NVIDIA sent to media outlets for testing were obviously not as refined as the retail ENGTX480 we've tested in this article. After weeks of testing the ASUS GeForce GTX 480 video card there were several significant differences clearly evident to me as an end-user and gamer, but unfortunately the initial bad press on this series has already done its damage. For those who might still be shopping for the very best a single GPU can offer, there's still a good reason to consider the GTX 480. The ASUS ENGTX480/2DI/1536MD5 delivers much lower power consumption at both idle and load, which then leads to even lower heat output and much more quiet cooling fan. For me, heat output and fan noise are my biggest concerns, and now they're finally on par with competing graphics solutions.