14 DAY TRIAL // Although this is a time when AMD's graphics subsidiary, ATI, is enjoying great success with its latest Radeon graphics cards, several of NVIDIA's board partners are continuously looking for better ways to improve the graphics chips released by the Santa Clara, California-based chip maker. One such example is Taiwanese manufacturer ASUS, which has stealthily introduced a new GeForce 9800GTX+-based graphics card that comes equipped with a custom cooling technology.
The newly introduced card comes to build on NVIDIA's first 55nm-based GPU, but delivers an optimum cooling level, thanks to its custom, dual-slot cooling solution. Although it is yet to be officially announced, it is known that the card basically delivers the same clock levels as those on the reference model.
However, with the help of the dual slot cooler, featuring four heatpipes, an exposed fan and lots of aluminum fins, it will certainly pass as a real overclocker. It is this overclocking potential that will eventually appeal to those gaming enthusiasts out there, especially to those who will do almost anything to achieve a high level of performance with their desktop gaming rigs.
In a more or less obvious attempt at capitalizing on the success of the recently released Batman movie, the “Dark Knight,” ASUS has dubbed the fancy-looking cooler Dark Knight. Aside from that, the card's GPU, memory and Shaders have been clocked to stock frequencies, and can deliver a speed of 738MHz, 2200MHz and 1836MHz, respectively. No word on the exact amount of memory, but chances are it will be equipped with 512MB of GDDR3. It delivers support for PCI Express 2.0, DirectX 10 and Shader Model 4.0, and obviously for NVIDIA's PureVideo HD and SLI technologies.
The card also comes with ASUS Gamer OS and Smart Doctor overclocking utilities and, according to TCMagazine, ASUS will even throw in a leather mouse pad to sweeten the offer. Unfortunately, pricing details are currently unavailable, but the card should soon go on sale at a reseller near you.
