The ECS N8800GT-512X is a somewhat different 8800GT card as compared to most of the reference card designs you see selling out there. Although ECS is late to the market, the N8800GT-512X stands out from the crowd as the NOISELESS 8800GT design. In fact, ECS also give you the flexibility to add on two low speed fans to cool down the GPU Core for better stability.

As it is a noiseless 0dB card, we wanted to check out what would be the temperature like when the card is under lots of stress load. Using the ATitool's 3D artifact detection software, we left the card to run with two fans attached. Using Rivatuner, we read off the temperature readings. At normal room temperature of around 30 Degrees, the GPU temp maintains at 43 degrees Celsius. After 10 mins of running the catalyst artifact scanner, the GPU temperature rises to  steady 48 Deg Celsius. We repeated the test, this time with the fan detached. At the beginning, it runs at 43 Deg Celsius, after 10 mins it shot up to 69 degree Celsius. That is pretty impressive considering retail reference cards out there shoots up to over 80 degrees in some instances when running under  heavy load.

If you notice, the card's SLI connector isn't the DUAL SLI connector type. Thus, it is unlikely that G92 series will be able to support 3 way SLI in the future unless it does not require a bridge but channel the control data via the PCIe bus.

In terms of technology, G92 does not support DX10.1 and SM 4.1. The card is also different from ATi cards which comes with an embedded audio controller for HDMI out. If you intend to use the card as a HTPC video processor, you would need to channel the audio from your audio card to the audio pins located on the card.

In conclusion, the card is superb in 3D performance. This card is best if you can't stand the noise coming from those reference design 8800GT cards out. It is also best for use with playing back HDDVD or Bluray. The only regret is the audio, you might want to channel the audio out from your on board SPDIF to a HIFI rather than channeling it out from the HDMI.

Price

Pros

• Noiseless 0db design
• Optional Fan add on to keep temperatures low

Cons

• Two slot design
• No DX10.1 support
• No SM4.1
• No Integrated HDMI with 5.1 output
• Might not support 3 way SLI
• Can't overclock very well

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10 stars.