Excellent balance of performance and value. (Asus EN8500GT MAGIC/HTP)

Member Name: jack-pinkney

Product:	Asus EN8500GT MAGIC/HTP
Date:	04/03/09 (88 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap, fairly reliable and features good applications.

Disadvantages: Useless for gaming and application functions reduced in vista.

Although this card scores toward the high end of the microsoft index rating system this is apparently where the relationship between microsoft and the product ends.
On paper this card is very appealling and seems to be an excellent balance of performance and value, it does install and perfom reasonably well under xp pro (I used the 64bit edition) but as soon as you introduce it to vista (I used ultimate 64 bit edition), which by now even gamers should be switching to for the directx 10 support, the grapics become choppy at best and to play any game from the last 3 years you have to uninstal and re-instal display drivers every start up!
This card does however have some notable good points, the Asus Smartdoctor application is an excellent tool that keeps tabs on the cards temperature and will even overclock to a higher performance level, that being said there was over functions avilable to the application which do not work under the windows vista operating system that really should seeming this card was relesed post vista.
All in all this card is worth everypenny if you are just using your machine for surfing the web and light gaming but if you want to play anything modern from the last few years then consider the xfx 9400gt from Nvidia.
Written by Jack Pinkney

Summary: Ideal browsing card but stear clear if you want gaming playabillity.

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