First Impressions

Pictures

The Front

The Back

There's two of 'em!

You can see both Rage Fury 128 Pro chips on the front shot of our engineering sample. ATI tells us that they haven't experienced any problems getting the card enough juice over the AGP bus even with two accelerators and two fans.

The RAM

The RAM

7ns?

The pre-release specs for the MAXX card had the memory clock at 150MHz, or even 155MHz. That's 7ns RAM you see right there. The 125MHz core and 143MHz memory clock are still enough to give decent frame rates in Quake 3 as you'll see later.

Installation was pretty simple, except for one little quirk. Windows 98 detected each accelerator separately, but the drivers took care of everything after a couple prerequisite installation reboots.

We launched Quake 3 and the game didn't give us any problems. We ran around for a bit, looking for hiccups or any unusual activity but the game ran fine. The MAXX performed just fine -as advertised, the dual accelerator operation was totally transparent.