My Big Fat Tech Review
Gaming on the Cheap
I recently decided to play through Fallout 3 again, but on my PC this time so I could use some mods from fallout3nexus.com. My only problem was my graphics card wasn't up to snuff and I was strapped for cash. Thankfully there was Asus ready and willing to help a gamer in need. With rebate the Asus runs about $140, considerably cheaper than the $300-$400 you'd pay for a high end graphics card. The Asus 5770 is on the high side of mid-range cards, but it's well stacked in terms of power. The engine clock is 850MHz and the memory is 1GB of DDR5 running at 4800MHz with 128 bit interface. The card comes with Asus' Smartdoctor which enables you to very easily overclock the card and get every precious ounce of MHz out the 5770. The other important features of the 5770 is that it supports DirectX 11 and is PCI-E 2.1 compliant, which means the card will upgrade nicely with a new board (right now it's in a crappy Dell Precision 370). Even sitting in my crappy Dell the Asus 5770 allows me to crank Fallout 3's graphics up to Ultra, even with modded weather effects and a couple of graphic enhancement mods on top of that. Sadly when it comes to battling 20 super mutants things get a bit choppy. I blame the Dell for this for a few reasons. One it's only a single core 3.8ghz 570j. Secondly it's only PCI-E 1.0. Last of all it's got crappy ventilation which limits my overclock of the card. Amazingly even with those limitations I can still play on High settings in the game. I have no doubt with some back up from a nice quad-core, a PCI-E 2.1 slot, and some room to breath the 5770 would have very few problems handling Ultra. If that isn't enough you could also crossfire the card with another 5770. Also did I mention it's cheap. If you're gaming on a budget the 5770 is right up your alley and with Fallout New Vegas coming it's time to pony up. Last of all the card took all of 5 minutes to install, of course, it's an Asus.
Update 12/02/10 - Nightmare. If you're running Windows 7 forget it. I couldn't find any set of drivers that would work properly, even though this card is certified compatible with 7. Who to blame? Microsoft? Asus? How 'bout everybody. No excuse on either side, it should work plain and simple. A pox on both their houses, well maybe not that far. I ended up going back to XP Pro Black Edition. The silver lining though is I found a better driver for XP. Direct from the Ati Radeon website of course. I was having one too many issues with the ASUS drivers and switched up to Radeon's. Much better. I also recommend GPU-Z for temp monitoring, great little program from techpowerup.com.