Graphics Card: Asus Extreme AX 600XT

After the introduction of PCI Express interface by Intel, both major chipset makers ATI and NVIDIA have taken a different approach towards making PCI graphic cards. ATI has made slight changes to its chipsets to make them PCI compatible. NVIDIA has added another bridging chip on the PCI cards, which means more heat and thus an extra cooling unit. The new PCI Express graphics card by Asus is based on an ATI AX 600XT chipset, has 128 MB DDR video memory, and also has DVI-1 and TV-Out. We tested it on an Intel desktop board D925XCV with P4 3.6 GHz processor, 1 GB of DDR2 memory, and 7200-RPM Serial ATA hard drive. We compared its results with an AGP-based ATI Radeon 9600 Pro and found major performance improvements (see table). In Quake3 Arena, AX 600XT showed 14.7% improvement, while in Unreal Tournament, it led by a whopping 29%. The card comes with games such as Tomb Raider, Invisible war and some utilities such as Unlead Photo Express.

The bottom line: The card is a good performer, packing 500 MHz of core clock speed and 740 MHz of memory clock speed. Of course at 18,600, it's something that only gaming freaks can afford.

Ankit Kawatra