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Asus has always been generous with accessories on its high-end products and the Extreme N7800 GTX TOP is no exception. I really like the Asus ViVo cable; it beats a dongle any day. You get about 1.5m of cable which terminates in a small breakout box. This means that it is easy to locate the connectors at a suitable location on your desk or close to a TV or projector. The breakout box offers both inputs and outputs in a convenient package. It has composite, S-Video and component output and composite and S-Video inputs. If you’re using the component video output connectors though, the composite and S-Video outputs are disabled.

The software bundle isn’t to be sniffed at either as you get a host of Asus utilities which include a special driver add-on that adds a video enhancing technology called ‘Splendid’. This can be set to boost the colour saturation, make the contrast softer or enhance details in dark sections of video. You also get a copy of the Asus DVD playback software, Medi@Show SE from CyberLink, Power Direct 3DE and VirtualDrive 9. A pretty decent game bundle is also provided which consists of Project Snowblind, Xpand Rally, Chaos League, Second Sight and finally Powerdrome: Race of Champions. You also get an imitation leather CD case to store the discs in.

On to the performance part, where the Extreme N7800 GTX TOP consistently edges out the Leadtek WinFast PX7800 GTX TDH – which you can read about on the next page, – by between one and five frames a second. Considering that the Leadtek card is clocked at 450/1250MHz respectively for the core and memory you can tell that the extra few MHz that Asus has clocked up the Extreme N7800 GTX TOP with doesn’t make a huge difference. The higher the resolution and the more filters you add, the bigger the difference, but, as you can tell from the performance graphs, neither card is exactly slow.

As an overall package the Asus Extreme N7800 GTX TOP is pretty good and considering that it’s priced at £347.21 it’s far from one of the most expensive 7800 GTX cards around, which all in all makes it a pretty good deal.

Verdict

The Asus Extreme N7800 GTX TOP offers a more efficient and quieter cooler, albeit one that’s turns the card into a two-slot solution. Higher clocks help deliver slightly improved performance, it has a useful break-out box for ViVo connections and there’s a good software bundle. Considering it’s well priced compared to the competition it earns an award.

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