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- Date:
- Monday , February 14, 2011
- Author:
- Mark Warner
- Editor:
- Brent Justice
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ASUS ENGTX570 Video Card Review
ASUS’ new ENGTX570 video card is competitively priced and has the potential for greatness using VoltageTweak. We compare it to the Radeon HD 6970 and see how well it performs out-of-the-box and overclocked using VoltageTweak. This review will show you just how tight things are around the $349 price point.
Introduction
ASUSTeK Computer Inc. is one of the largest and most successful computer hardware manufacturers in the world. A Taiwan-based company, it manufactures a wide variety of computer hardware, including motherboards, video cards, optical drives, notebooks, networking equipment, barebones desktop, and server systems, among many others. In 2008, it sold over 24 million motherboards, grossed 8.1 billion U.S., and won 3,056 awards from various enthusiasts and IT related outlets.
Today we are going to be taking a look at ASUS’s GeForce GTX 570 offering: the ENGTX570/2DI/1280MD5 supporting VoltageTweak.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570
NVIDIA launched the GeForce GTX 570 on December 7th, 2010. It is based on the same improved Fermi silicon that was the GeForce GTX 580, but with slightly reduced specifications. While the GTX 580 sports 512 CUDA cored, the GTX 570 has 480. It has 60 texture units and 40 ROPs and is rated for 219 Watts, while the GTX 580 has 64 texture units, 48 ROPs, and is rated to draw 244 Watts.
The GTX 570 comes standard with 1280MB of GDDR5 on a 320-bit bus clocked at 950MHz for a data rate of 3.8GHz. Its GPU clock rate is designed to be set at 732MHz, with a CUDA core clock speed of 1.464GHz. The GTX 570 boasts a texture filtering rate of 43.9 billion texels per second. The standard design calls for two 6-pin auxiliary power connectors, two dual-link DVI-I output connectors, and one mini-HDMI port. The cooling device uses NVIDIA’s vapor chamber design, just like the one that appears on the GeForce GTX 580. It improves on the heat pipe concept by providing a higher surface area to mass ratio, which improves the transfer of heat from the cooler to the surrounding air.
The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 is designed to sit at the $350 segment as a refresh for the GeForce GTX 470, which has fallen in price to under $250 USD since the launch of the GTX 570.
ASUS ENGTX570
The ASUS ENGTX570 is currently available for $349. It is a factory overclocked video card, but the overclock is not significant. The graphics core is overclocked by 10MHz, and the shader core by 20MHz. The memory is not overclocked out of the box. It supports Vcore voltage tweaking by way of ASUS’ SmartDoctor software for extended overclocking capabilities. Leaving aside the miniscule overclock, the ENGTX570 is essentially a reference-design video card. It uses the same PCB, cooling device, and output layout as NVIDIA’s reference design. What will make this video card unique is its highest-stable overclock when using VotageTweak, which we will use and test today.
The ENGTX570’s box features a mounted and winged character on a dramatic castle background. Information about the actual video card is somewhat sparse, as ASUS seems to have taken a more minimalist design approach than some other manufacturers. The back side of the box has a complete features list in several languages, and some helpful diagrams.
The ASUS ENGTX570 comes bundled with a driver and utility disc, a setup guide, a dual Molex to 6-pin auxiliary power supply adaptor, a mini-HDMI to HDMI adaptor, and a DVI to VGA adaptor.
The front of the ENGTX570 video card itself is covered in a sleek and glossy black plastic cooler shroud, emblazoned with a large silver ASUS logo. The fan hub is blank, and the only other detail is a green NVIDIA strip to the fore of the video card. The front of the PCB is entirely shrouded. The fan takes air in at the back of the video card, forces it across the vapor chamber, and finally out of the vent slots at the PCI bracketed end of the device.
The ENGTX570 features two SLI bridge connectors for triple-SLI action. It requires the use of two 6-pin auxiliary power supply connectors.
The back of the ENGTX570 is quite typical, with several stickers, a great many surface mount components, and some stainless screws to keep the cooler attached to the other side of the video card. It features two dual-link DVI-I connectors and one min-HDMI port.
The Competition
The primary competition for the ASUS ENGTX570 in terms of priceis the AMD Radeon HD 6970, along with other GeForce GTX 570s. For this evaluation, we are comparing the ENGTX570 with a stock Radeon HD 6970, and also with the ENGTX570 after overclocking using VoltageTweak. Because of that, we will describe our overclocking efforts before we go into gaming performance comparisons.