For performance enthusiasts, there's no such thing as too much power. Of course when it comes down to dropping half a grand on video cards, they are not always the most reasonable of choices, but reason be damned if it means we can get more eye candy and speed. Nevermind the insanity of cashing in those rent checks by doubling up cards for either CrossFire or SLI.

We'll come back to the whole justification of spending a lot of money on hardware, but let's focus on the review at hand as we were lucky enough to have ASUS send over their latest flagship ATI part in the form of the ASUS Extreme Radeon EAX1900 XTX Video Card. Everything from Avivo to Shader Model 3 is here, but we can find this on ATI's own cards. The question is, does ASUS bring anything unique to the table?

ASUS Extreme Radeon EAX1900 XTX Video Card

Make no mistake. This is no video card for your mom and dad's family room PC. Packing ATI's top-of-the-line X1900 XTX VPU, this card is destined for dedicated gaming PCs armed with a serious CPU and oodles of ram.

Built on the 90nm fab process, the X1900 XTX carries a core clock of 650MHz. The smaller fab process gives the X1900 series the ability to scale clock speeds upwards more easily, and the core will consume less power than previous models based on the R400 core.

Other features supported in hardware are Avivo display, H.264 hardware acceleration and Shader Model (SM) 3.0 support. Avivo is ATI's technology for improving the image quality of almost anything that is displayed, from pictures and videos to HD content.

There are basically five key stages to a video pipeline. Avivo makes improvements to the analog capture with automatic gain control, 12-bit analog-to-digital conversion (ADC), 3D comb filtering and noise reduction. A full whitepaper can be found here if you require additional information.

HDR supports 64-bit floating point color formats which is capable of 65 000 levels of brightness and a dynamic range of 2.2 trillion. Furthermore, along with the tradition AA options, HDR is supported with three new AA levels, Adaptive, Temporal, and Super AA (CrossFire only).

Compared to the previous generation X1800 series, ATI has increased the number of Shader processors from 16 to 48 in the X1900 family. The number of discrete flow control units have increased by the same margin which results in almost triple the number of Pixel shader operations per second.

The ASUS EAX1900 XTX supports CrossFire mode with the appropriate motherboard and CrossFire master card. At this time, ASUS has two Intel based i955 and i975 motherboards that supports CrossFire, and an ATI CrossFire Xpress 3200 board, so you do have a number of motherboard options here. The ATI CrossFire master card (as well as all others) for this family is based on the X1900 XT, so the ASUS EAX1900 XTX will need to downclock in CrossFire mode, but this mode will still be faster than the ASUS card by itself.

All X1900 XTX cards come equipped with 512MB of GDDR3 memory clocked 1.55GHz. Other manufacturers may clock them higher, but the ASUS EAX1900 XTX stuck with ATI's specs. The Ring Bus memory controller features support of the aforementioned GDDR3, high memory clock scaling, a new cache design, improved Hyper-Z, and Programmable Arbitration Logic. As the controller's name implies, the Ring Bus have two rings (256-bit each) that run in opposite directions to reduce latency. For each memory channel, there is a ring stop which allows a direct link to the memory interface. Overall, this makes for a less complex design and gives ATI more options for memory speeds.

Physically, the ASUS EAX1900 XTX is just as massive as ATI's reference card. In fact, the only difference between the ASUS and ATI model is the ASUS branding sticker on the fan itself. The dual height cooling apparatus does an excellent job of keeping the VPU cool, and doesn't run quite that loud when the card isn't under load. It's audible mind you, but it could be worse. Once you start cranking those triangles and pixels through the pipelines, the noise does start increasing and in our Corsair Nautilus cooled setup, the ASUS EAX1900 XTX is easily the loudest device in the system. This will of course be a nuisance for silent PC enthusiasts, but dedicated gamers will probably not be terribly concerned of this.

A PCI Express power connection is still required for the X1900, but no adapter is included. According to ATI, to properly meet the PCI Express specification, a proper CPU power supply is required to power each PCI Express device. All of the Radeon X1900 based cards on the market, from ASUS to ATI and others now require that the PC's power supply has a graphics card connector on it.

Due to the size of the cooler, the ASUS EAX1900 XTX will consume a PCI slot next to the PEG slot. One half of the PCI backplate has a grill to draw air into the cooling unit (which is exhausted out of the rear of the card and into the case). The main IO plate has two DVI connections which sandwich the S-Video out.

Rounding things out are the various cables and CDs typically found in video card packages. ASUS provides the user with one S-Video, one composite as well as splitters needed to output with those cables to your TV. If you're stuck with an analog monitor, you'll be happy to see that ASUS includes not one but two D-Sub to DVI adapters. The requisite manual is present as well as a software bundle which includes King Kong. Not my game of choice, but at least it's new. All of this can be stored in the CD carrying pouch ASUS includes.

Gaming Performance

Operating System: Windows XP Professional (5.1, Build 2600) Service Pack 2
Processor: Genuine Intel(R) CPU 3.73GHz (2 CPUs)
Memory: 1024MB Corsair XMS2-8000UL RAM
DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0c (4.09.0000.0904)
Card name: Radeon X1900 Series

The games to be used for benchmarking are as follows:

Doom 3 v1.3

Unreal Tournament 2004 v3355

Far Cry v1.33

Half-Life 2

Half-Life 2: Lost Coast

3DMark06

We'll be pitting the ASUS EAX1900 XTX up against the ATI X1900 and MSI 7800GTX. We did try to acquire NVIDIA's latest but did not have any luck for this review. All tests were done at 1600x1200 and 1280x1024 with 2x AntiAliasing and Anisotropic filtering.

Bench'emAll!'s default timedemos will be used to collect our scores. 3DMark06 was run with all the tests supported by hardware turned on, default options, 3 times and averaged out. Note that one test is unsupported by ATI hardware, so we disabled the same test for NVIDIA as well.

Doom 3

As we've seen in our X1900 review in the past, the card is comparable to the 7800GTX. Neither card does as well as the ASUS card, though we're talking about a different class of hardware here.

In terms of gameplay, all three cards "felt" the same. Unlike Quake 3, I feel that today's video cards are much more prepared for current and next-gen games when compared to the initial 3D accelerators of that time. While we experienced very smooth game play, I would not be able to tell you what card I was using if I did not already know beforehand.

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