The GeForce GTX 480 is an interesting product, grand performance, DirectX 11 compatible, high image quality and a very rich feature set. The downsides however is its heat and noise levels. It's what is holding back a lot of consumers out there to purchase a product of this caliber. With a recent BIOS update NVIDIA did address the heat levels a little bit, making the product slightly more interesting. But sure, it still a noisy fracker alright.

To compensate the deficits that NVIDIA enforced on the GTX 400 series, the ODM and AIBs had to be creative, they need to be on the lookout for some new features that make this product more interesting, we call that creating incentive.

ASUS though, stuck to the reference design. They figured .. let's heat it up a little more :) And as such they have released their ENGGTX480 series GeForce GTX 480 cards, with GPU voltage control.

Now while writing this introduction, I still have not actually installed the card and thus will not know how it will perform. But releasing a graphics card that easily runs to 90 degrees C when stressed now combined with an overclock tweak utility with voltage tweaking, it seriously does make me scratch behind my ears or at the very least raise one eye browse. See we feel that voltage tweaking on the GTX 400 series really requires custom cooling or even better, a nice liquid cooling setup.

None the less, we never take things for granted and the ODMs are always right until proven otherwise by our reviews, so have a peek at the product we'll be testing today and then head onwards into a nice and deep review of the ASUS ENGGTX480. Can we really overclock that much more with a little extra GPU voltage ?

Let's find out shall we.