Asus ENGTX470/2DI/1280MD5

Asus is a high-end component company so when we found its oddly named ENGTX470/2DI/1280MD5 graphics card has an end user price of just US $377 we were shocked. At this price it is $197 less expensive than Gigabyte's GTX 470 and $93 cheaper than Zotac's GTX 470.

The ENGTX470 - like all the other cards here - features nVidia's ‘Fermi' GeForce GTX 470 GPU and in this iteration, Asus follows nVidia's reference design to the letter. The GPU and CUDA cores run at 607MHz and 1215MHz while the 1280MB of GDDR3 RAM runs at a clock frequency of 3348MHz. The GTX 470 packs DirectX 11 support and shares a number of features with its bigger brother, the GTX 480.

The Asus ships with a few utilities and demo software but like the other cards here it lacks games out of the box. Unfortunate.

Running our benchmarks on the ENGTX470 we couldn't help but be impressed. In our new Heaven v2.0 DirectX 11 benchmark the Asus managed a framerate of 47.1fps at 1680 x 1050 pixels, just 0.2fps slower than the $93 more expensive Zotac GTX 470 card. Its results at 1920 x 1200 pixels also tied the Gigabyte and Zotac cards. The only card noticeably faster than Asus' GTX 470 (and all the other cards here) is Galaxy's pre-overclocked GeForce GTX 470 GC (also reviewed on ITP.net).