Asus 128mb PhysX Card Review/Preview

Testing Notes

With our graphics cards I test to a “real-world” experience. I believe that seeing numbers for tests is all well and good but it’s the actual performance that the end user will see that is the most important factor in testing. With PhysX this means that I took a look at the games that are available for PhysX and played them thoroughly to ensure I got an impression of the gameplay you will get with a PhysX card.

I was going to set up the card with dual 7900GTX’s in SLI: but I decided that most people would have a discreet sound card installed in their system so I used one 7900GTX and kept in my SB Audigy 2 ZS.

Test Setup

The test setup was as follows:

AMD Opteron 175 @ 2.8GHz (watercooled)
DFI LANPARTY UT Sli-D motherboard
Mushkin Redline PC4000 running at 255 x 11 1:1 3-3-2-5
Club3d 7900GTX 512mb running 91.31 Forceware
HDD: OS – 160gb Hitachi Deskstar SATA II
HDD: Gaming – 2 x 40gb Hitachi Deskstars in RAID 0
Sound: SoundBlaster Audigy 2 ZS
Power: PCP&C 510 SLi
Lian Li PC70B modded for watercoling and plenty of additional cooling.

G.R.A.W. was running all the latest patches and I installed the latest beta release of Cell Factor.

Please note that movies have been resized for easy upload/download

Installation

Installation of the card was simple. I inserted the card in a spare PCI slot, checked for seating and booted up, making sure the additional Power Molex was properly inserted. I installed the latest drivers on Ageia’s website: 2.4.4.

There was no issues installing the drivers of the card and no issues with the Ageia’s PhysX card running any of the games.