Asus ENGTX280

Asus ENGTX280
Powerful, no-compromises video board

ASUS'S NEW VIDEO CARD based on nVidia's GTX280 chipset, the ENGTX280, is all about the speed. A single card nearly doubled the performance of the 9800 GTX in many of our tests, and even beat a pair of dual-GPU GeForce 9800 GX2 cards running in Quad SLI mode on others.
This card finally makes DirextX 10 (DX10) games playable at full resolution and detail on 30-inch monitors. With a pair of GRX280s in SLI mode, even those demanding DX10 games manage silky-smooth frame rates; you can install a third card in a 3-Way SLI system for an even greater performance boost. (As with earlier cards, nVidia's drivers disable multiple monitor support when running in SLI mode; you'll have to disable the second card to use more than one display.)
Such performance comes at a price-the ENGTX280 sells for $499. The board features a pair of High-Bandwith Digital COntent Protection (HDCP)-enabled, dual-link DVI ports; a digital audio input for use with an HDMI adapter (not included); and a component-video/S-Video output.
Visual quality is superb, and the board supports nVidia's Pure-Video HD, which lowers CPU load during DVD and Blu-ray playback, offering full hardware decoding of MPEG-2 and H.264 video, and partial acceleration of VC-1 video. DVDs and HD WMV files both looked stelar, with rich color and smooth playback even on a 30-inch screen.
With the release of the GTX 280, nVidia is making a big splash about its GPU computing technologies, which helps the card's GPU process information faster than your computer's CPU. nVidia claims that the GTX 280's GPU, with 240 cores running at 1.3GHz, is the fastest floating-point processor yet for the PC. -D.A.
source: Computer Shopper September 2008.

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