The last few years has seen an evolution in the world of computers and computer video cards as technology keeps making leaps and bounds forward. In the year 2000 the fastest most feature-rich video card was the GeForce 2 Ultra, retailing for $499 from NVIDIA. The GeForce2 Ultra had Hardware Transformation and Lighting as its main feature, a fill rate of 2 Gigapixels a second and memory bandwidth of fewer than 8GB a second. Today, the modern video card has over 40GB of memory bandwidth, supports Pixel and Vertex Shader 3.0 and multi-gigapixel fillrates the GeForce2 series could only dream about.

NVIDIA is a video chip designer founded in 1993 by Jen-Hsun Huang. The first NVIDIA video card was the NV1, a card that combined video and audio functions, supported Sega's Dreamcast controllers and was a general failure on the market. Microsoft introduced DirectX using polygons to render objects, while NV1 used quadratic equations. Today NVIDIA is a multi-billion dollar company that is successful in virtually every market that they are a part of.

ASUS is one of the biggest Taiwanese motherboard and other computer component companies. A Tier-1 OEM, ASUS delivered over 1/3 of the worlds motherboard output last year. ASUS manufactures motherboards, video cards, sound cards, DVD drives and other computer components. They are one of the companies that manufacture video cards on both NVIDIA and ATI video chips. Last year NVIDIA released the 7800 GTX in June. Early this year NVIDIA introduced the 7900 chip. The 7900GT is the mainstream high-end chip and has been very successful for NVIDIA. Enter the ASUS EN7900GT video card, the product of which we are reviewing today.