ASUS EAX800XT/2TD/256

ASUS is perhaps best known for their motherboards, but they’ve also developed a reputation for building excellent graphics cards as well. Among NVIDIA manufacturers, ASUS was the first board partner to produce single slot GeForce FX 5900 Ultra/5950 Ultra cards, a tradition which they’ve maintained on their GeForce 6800 Ultra card. They were also the first of the GeForce4 Ti 4200 manufacturers to merge the GeForce4 Ti 4600 PCB and high-speed BGA memory with the Ti 4200 core, resulting in a card that earned our Editor’s Choice Award two years ago. And of course, no one can forget ASUS’ first ATI-based graphics card, the RADEON 9800 XT-based A9800XT TVD256. This was the first non-ATI card to ship with VIVO support, and thanks to the addition of Smart Doctor, the A9800 XT offered robust overclocking options and built-in hardware monitoring.

For RADEON X800 XT, ASUS once again set out to do something unique. Rather than rely on ATI’s reference design, ASUS had to make a few slight changes. The most notable is the board’s unique cooling. ASUS has replaced the stock copper heatsink/fan unit ATI and most of its board partners use, with a custom copper-based cooling unit that is composed of a copper heat pipe and accompanying heatsink.

Besides that change, ASUS’ cooler is also larger than ATI’s. By utilizing a heatsink with greater surface area, the ASUS cooler does a more effective job of transferring heat off the graphics core – board temperatures on the ASUS board were 10% lower than that of the reference ATI card. Of course, we should note that the ATI reference card uses its onboard thermal diode, whereas the ASUS card has to rely on an external sensor, so the temperature comparisons aren’t 100% comparable, but at the same time we could literally feel the difference in temperatures on the PCB of the two cards. The final addition ASUS adds to their EAX800XT/2TD/256 card is a blue LED underneath the card’s fan, and four blue LEDs on each corner of the card’s plastic duct.

ASUS Extreme AX800 XT card

Dual DVIs

The second aspect you’ll notice is the second DVI connector. That’s right, the ASUS EAX800XT/2TD/256 is the first RADEON X800 XT card to feature dual DVI connections! This is the only X800 XT PCI-E card we’re aware of to boast this feature. Powering the second DVI connector is an Sil 1162 DVI transmitter from Silicon Image. The chip sits behind the first DVI transmitter, residing just below the card’s fan. Because of these changes, ASUS has made a few slight changes to the reference board design, but there are no major changes (a few components are merely shifted around to make room for the larger cooler).

Top of the card

The back of the card

If the hardware improvements ASUS has implemented aren’t enough to impress you, ASUS continues to provide their Smart Doctor software with the EAX800XT/2TD/256. Smart Doctor provides active hardware monitoring of the card’s temperature (both graphics core and memory) and voltages. If Smart Doctor senses trouble (excess heat or a fan failure), it can alert the user, preventing damage to the graphics card.

For overclocking, Smart Doctor can be used to manually adjust clock speeds, or it can dynamically adjust clocks itself automatically, with the final clock speed depending on the application currently loaded or temperature.

All this does come at a cost however. ASUS has elected to skip the Rage Theater chip, so the Extreme AX800XT/2TD/256 doesn’t offer the VIVO capabilities supported by other cards in this comparison. ASUS also uses 2.0ns Samsung GDDR3 memory modules on their card, just like ATI.

Bundled accessories

ASUS includes plenty of extras with the EAX800XT/2TD/256. Also included in the card’s packaging is a 300K USB webcam, a component video cable, two DVI adapters, a copy of Deus Ex: Invisible War, PowerDirector 3, Media Show, Cool3D, Photo Express, and ASUS DVD XP.