Asus AX X800 XT Review

Review Pages

1. Introduction
2. Test System
3. 3D Mark03
4. Aquamark 3
5. Codecreatures
6. GLExcess
7. Doom 3
8. Farcry
9. Unreal Tournament 2004
10. Hitman: Contracts
11. X2: The Threat
12. Halo
13. Tomb Raider : Angel of Darkness
14. Unreal Tournament 2003
15. Anti-Aliasing
16. Anisotropic-Filtering
17. Overclocking
18. Conclusion

Asus Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition

Asus managed to surprise us once more. Except from the great variety of consumer electronics and optical drives, Asus has also released some top notch hardware products. In the past I had the opportunity to review the Asus FX 5900 GE VGA card. You can read the review in CDRinfo's first VGA roundup. And being faithful to it's promises Asus has send us it's latest VGA card - The AX X800 XT supplied with 256 MB of DDR 3 Video Memory.

As known ATI's XT models are already overclocked by the manufacturer, so the default clock speeds are 520 MHz for it's engine and 1.12 Ghz (2x 520 MHz) for it's memory clock. Very high clock speeds indeed but let's see more about the specifications of this Graphics monster.

- Specifications

GPU	ATI X800 XT (R420)
Memory Bus Width	256 MB
Memory interface	256 bit
Memory Type	DDR3
Core Clock	520 MHz
Memory Clock	1.12 GHz (2x560)
Memory Bandwidth	36.8 GB/s
Pixel Fill Rate	8.8 Gpixels/sec
Geometry rate	750 Mtriangles/sec
Bus	8x/4x/2x AGP
Processing technology	0.13µ
Output Connections	DVI out, CRT out, S-Video out
Cooling	Fan Sink
2D Display Resolutions & Hz	640x480@240, 800x600@240, 1024x768@200, 1152x864@170, 1280x1024@150, 1600x1200@100, 1920x1440@85, 2048x1536@85
3D Maximum resolution	2048x1536 with 16.7M colors
Anisotropic Filtering modes (AF)	2x/4x/6x
Full Scene Anti-Aliasing (FSAA) modes	2x/4x//8x/16x
Dual Display	Supported
Pipelines	16
Texture units per pixel pipeline	1
Technologies supported	-SmartShader HD -SmoothVision HD -HyperZ HD - VideoShader HD
OpenGL support	2.0
Pixel Shader Support	3.0
Vertex Shader Support	3.0
DTV/HDTV decoding	Supported
System requirements	Intel® Pentium® 4/III/Celeron™, AMD® Duron/Athlon®/Athlon XP®, or 4X (1.5V), compatible with AGP, 8X (0.8v) or Universal AGP 3.0 bus configuration • Windows 2000, XP • 128MB of system memory • Installation software requires CD-ROM drive • DVD playback requires DVD drive • 350 Watt power supply or greater recommended

The front side of Asus AX X800 XT

Very nice fan and guess what...

... it glows in the dark!!!

The back side

The back side of the fan sink

Fan sink removed

A closer look of the R420 GPU

Samsung memories used

ATI's Rage Theater chip

-The bundle

Asus is one of the few manufacturers offering great software bundle. The accompanied software is consisted of the following:

Asus/CyberLink: PowerDirector 3DE
Ulead Cool 3D SE 3.0
Ulead Photo Express SE 4.0
Asus/CyberLink: MediaShow SE 2.0
Asus DVD XP
WinDVD Creator
Deus Ex Invisible War
Counter Strike - Condition Zero (2 disky)
Instalation CD (2 disks)

A USB camera is also included in the box. It's specifications are the following:

- USB CMOS camera
- 300 kpixels
- Built-in microphone
- More than 30fps / QVGA
- Ideal for video conference, video chatting
- Support hardware snap-shot button