ASUS EAX1800XT Top Graphics Card 

Monday, January 23, 2006

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The battle for the 'fastest gaming card in the world' title has been raging since the time of Voodoo cards and will continue as long as newer, more power hungry games are being created. With the X1800 range of cards, ATi has attempted to snatch that moniker away from NVIDIA's 7800GTX 512. The card is gigantic, and covers the adjacent PCI slot.

Similar to the 7800GT Dual, the packaging is massive and has many interesting things inside. First is the Xitepad which is a force feed back game pad! There is also a CD case and the usual DVD creation, and other software. No Call of Duty 2 again with this card, which is a pity considering the 50k price tag. ASUS has, however, bundled in a CD wallet so you can store your games in style.

From the exterior, the card looks amazing with a shiny smudge prone reflective surface on the front and fast and reasonably silent fan. It has the same dangling molex connector as in the one reviewed above, which connects to an external power supply. This save you the trouble of buying a new SMPS with this card.

Coming to the chipset, the card is based on the R520-the latest offering from ATi. It is also the top-end variant and, thus, supports Crossfire. It is also AVIVO compatible. AVIVO is ATi's optimization of video and displays for your PC. For all your video out/in needs, ASUS has bundled in ample cables including the usual S-Video etc. Since ASUS has already overclocked the card a little bit, we really had no room left so we tested this card at the stock speeds.

Our test rig consisted of an AMD Athlon X2 4800+, ASUS A8Nx32-SLI with a Beta BIOS version 0805 coupled with 1 GB of DDR400 RAM and a 120GB 7200rpm SATA HDD. We used the latest catalyst drivers from ATi's website(Ver. 5.12). The card lost out to NVIDIA in the Doom3 test but then NVIDIA traditionally does brilliantly here anyway. In Far Cry, the card was a clear winner giving nearly 5 more frames per second than the GTX 512.

Bottom Line:  Even with a slightly overclocked GPU, ATi has not been able to give any kind of a challenge to the NVIDIA 7800GTX 512. If you want the fastest, that is the one you should get, especially since it retails for 53k, just 2k more than this card.

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