ASUS EAX1800XT Top Graphics Card 

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.