ASUS GeForce GTX 470 ENGTX470 Video Card Review

Final Thoughts and Conclusions

The ASUS GeForce ENGTX470 graphics card proved to be a slightly better performing graphics card than the reference designed Radeon HD 5850 graphics card that we tested it against. When compared to the factory overclocked Sapphire Radeon HD 5850 Toxic Edition, the ASUS GeForce GTX 470 traded blows in a benchmark battle too close to call. Since a Radeon HD 5850 can be purchased for $299.99 shipped without rebates, the ASUS GeForce GTX 470, priced at $349.99 plus $8 shipping has it work cut out for it, however, NVIDIA has always had a loyal customer base. The GeForce GTX 470 made short work of the GeForce GTX 285, so if you have been waiting to upgrade from a DX10 or older graphics card to a DirectX 11 card, the time has come.

Overclocking performance on the GeForce GTX 470 was impressive, although the ASUS SmartDoctor utility didn’t allow for the memory clock to be increased. We noticed nearly a 14% improvement in 3DMark Vantage by overclocking the GPU core 100Mhz on the GTX470. You can’t complain about an improvement like that for free! We gave our feedback to ASUS about SmartDoctor and we have been assured that future versions will unlock memory overclocking and possibly increase the GPU core clock limit. Once this is done you should be able to get even more performance out of this card. If you wanted to buy one of these or already have one, then you can use other overclocking utilities like NVIDIA Systems Tools to get the desired overclock that you want. Our focus for this article was on the ASUS video card and not overclocking or using third party utilities, so that is why you didn’t see us using other applications to push this card to the bleeding edge.

When it comes to pricing the ASUS ENGTX470/2DI/1280MD5 video card is available from Newegg for $349.99 plus $7.87 shipping. The card is currently out-of-stock, but at least it is selling for the MSRP and not being marked up. Most all of the GeForce GTX 470 graphics cards on the market today are based off the NVIDIA reference design, so the big differences are the bundles, software utilities and the warranty. ASUS doesn’t include any games with the GeForce GTX 470, but the bundle and software included is fairly robust and allows you to use the card the way it was designed to be operated. It would have been nice if ASUS would have included the mini-HDMI to HDMI adapter though. Another plus is that ASUS includes a 3-year warranty on this graphics card and the user doesn’t have to register it to have a valid 3 year warranty. It goes by the serial number on the graphics card. If the three year period is ever in question, ASUS says that they will always honor the 3 year time frame from the date of purchase of the item, so hang onto your receipts! This is better than some other brands like Palit and Galaxy as they only offer one and a two-year warranties, respectively.

Legit Bottom Line: The ASUS ENGTX470 graphics card is a solid card based off NVIDIA’s reference design, but it has to compete with the ATI Radeon HD 5850 in enthusiast graphics card market that costs $50 less.