ASUS EN8800GT G HTDP 512M no temperature and fan control

I have recently bought an ASUS EN8800GT/G/HTDP/512M, because I needed CUDA 1.1 compliant device for my work. It was a sort of half-upgrade/half-downgrade purchase because I have replaced my trusty 8800GTX which is considerably faster card with more RAM, but it lacks the feature I needed, and it runs a lot hotter than the new generation of cards.

I was attempting to minimize my expenses (and losses as well), so I settled for the ASUS 8800GT card which looks like this (there wasn't much of a choice anyway):

I was impressed by the looks of the heatsink/fan — its appearance suggested cool and quiet running card. Boy I was wrong... but more on that later. First take a look at a few details:

I must admit that I was hasty again, and I didn't do my homework before purchasing this card. That is understandable given that it is a new product, and that there were no reliable reviews for it on the web so far.

That said, I took the card out to take those pictures — looking at the fan header was an afterthought. It is so wrong to assume by the looks.

What made me take it out for an inspection? Well, call me a nerd but I want to be able to see fan RPM and GPU temperature. When I installed the card I have noticed that not a single hardware monitoring tool (Everest, nTune, RivaTuner) can report the GPU temperature or fan speed.

The only piece of software that can read anything (and that is only GPU temperature) is ASUS SmartDoctor. Great, yet another application with a set of drivers which loads at Windows startup just to be able to read a single value... Doh!

As for fan sensing and control — you can simply forget about it. The fan lacks tachometer output so you can't measure RPM, and to me it seems that it runs at 100% all the time. It wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't loud. Standard airflow hiss is not a problem here — it emits constant medium pitched tone which can be very annoying to some people including me.

If you have a lot of wax in your ears you can stick with it. If you have nerves and don't mind voiding your warranty, you can try replacing the fan with a standard 8cm fan cut-out from a frame (provided you find one with adequate airflow), and connect it to one of the mainboard fan headers or a dedicated fan controller. If you are in the same league as me (i.e. you hate noise and inability to control fan speed and GPU temperature), then avoid ASUS EN8800GT/G/HTDP/512M like a plague.

As for the package, I dislike getting only one DVI to VGA adapter (of cheap quality with no pin protection cap). You also get 3 disks — 2 CDs and a (decent) game DVD. ASUS could have put the manual on the driver CD. It would be only one of the myriad of other ways to cut production costs and save the environment, but no — they decided to get cheap when designing the hardware instead.

Finally, lets say something about being "green" — ASUS surely doesn't care about ecology, because retail box this card came in is approximately two times bigger than the box for my old EVGA 8800GTX, and the only thing extra ASUS put inside is a thin CD wallet.