Never ever buy Asus

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Shortly after Christmas I upgraded my gaming machine’s video card from a now-outdated ATI X850XT to a top of the line Asus 8800GT TOP edition card.  The card seemed to run great for less demanding games, and even on more demanding ones for shorter periods of time.

The first time I got to really punish it at a LAN party the card failed.  I started getting a lot of artifacting along with system lockups.  After looking in to it I found out the card was overheating.

Now, I had to ask my self why the performance video card I just shelled out $300 for was OVER HEATING.  Long story short, Asus majorly fucked up when designing this card.

1) The card has ZERO ability to control the speed of the fan.  Not only that, but the fan isn’t even a dynamic speed fan, it has 2 wires going to it.  It turns on, and that is it.  This means the card has NO ability to ramp up fan speed as the card heats up from intense 3D game play.  WTF?

2)  The memory chips on the card have ZERO cooling.  NEITHER ACTIVE NOR PASSIVE.   You read that right.  There are not even small heatsinks on the ram chips.

Asus really screwed the pooch on this one.  They put out a performance video card, then fail to give it adequate cooling, causing the card to over-heat and eventually lock up non-stop.  Why would Asus do this?  Well my theory is the company’s apparent ever-declining lack of quality.  They have had massive problems with other products they make (specifically the Striker Extreme motherboard… another performance piece of hardware that has XBox-360 levels of failure rates).  I should’ve known better then to buy Asus after their Striker incident, but the card had the highest numbers of any 8800GT and I couldn’t pass it up.  Now I am paying for it.  My machine is sitting silent with out a video card right now as I send the piece of crap Asus back to the lovely folks at Newegg (best company I have ever dealt with BTW).  As soon as I get my refund I will be buying the EVGA 8800GT SuperClocked edition card.

From what I’ve read online EVGA actually did things right.  You can control fan speeds and the heatsink covers the whole card.

Never again Asus.  Never again.