The Asus ENGTS250 DK videocard is powered by the nVidia GeForce GTS 250 core. Code named 'G92', this graphics processor has been around the block a few times, in the form of the Geforce 8800 GTS 512, the 9800 GTX and the 9800 GTX+.

This has seen the G92 core die-shrunk from 65nm down to 55nm, as well as reductions in its overall power consumption requirements.

Since the nVidia G92 core is based on the same technology as the previous GeForce 9800GTX/GTX+ GPUs, PCSTATS will do a brief overview of the differences in this review. We know you're not going to read pages of technical jargon, and frankly we're not going to write that much in place of time with benchmarks.

First off, the nVidia G92-421-B1 core now has an overall core clock speed of 740MHz and a memory clock speed of 1836MHz. While the overall clock speeds have increased, the G92 core still retains the overall 128 stream processor cores from its earliest incarnations.

For those who like theoretical numbers, the nVidia GeForce GTS 250 GT GPU boasts a texture fill rate of 47.2 GTexels per second and a memory bandwidth of 70.4 GB/s. Compared to the rival AMD Radeon HD 4850, which has a fill rate of 20.8 GTexels/s and 73.2 GB/s of memory bandwidth.

nVidia videocards are still a step behind their AMD counterparts when it comes to HDMI video output over the DVI ports. While both companies' latest videocards support hardware video decoding, nVidia still hasn't included an audio codec on its new Geforce graphics cards. This means that the included DVI-to-HDMI adapter has to be used with an S/PDIF header in order to output the 7.1 channel audio stream. This makes for slightly messy cabling, but shouldn't be a problem as long as you remember to plug the HDMI adapter into the yellow DVI output on the Asus ENGT250 DK's I/O panel.

Two & Three-way nVidia SLI

nVidia's Scalable Link Interface has undergone constant updates to improve its performance and compatibility with recent games, as well as add to its overall feature set.

The Asus ENGTS250 DK has two SLI connectors, so it can be paired with either one or two more Geforce GTS 250 videocards. The older Geforce 9800GTX+ videocard is also supported in SLI mode, as long as both videocards have the same amount of video memory.

The most recent major update to nVidia's SLI technology finally adds supports for multiple monitors while SLI is enabled. This is great for games that scale well with multiple GPUs and can also take advantage of multiple monitors, like Supreme Commander. The Geforce GTS 250, like the Geforce 9800GTX+ before it, can be run in two or three-way SLI configurations, although the amount of additional performance diminishes significantly once a third videocard is added.