ASUS Radeon 9800 XT: Turning-point
Findings
Findings is the responsible part. Let's start with the most essential - ATI has become a first-line manufacturer of hardware. While cooperation with GIGABYTE was no more than a forced decision for both companies. a contract with Asus is already serious.
This radical move by Asus, such as engaging it marketing and production capacities to ATI, is caused be several factors. First, you can't ignore ATI any longer. Otherwise, somebody else will skim the creams. Secondly, Asus is ambitious to become "number one" on the VGA market as well, which will be easier through producing video cards of leading manufacturers. Thirdly, NVIDIA has lost grip and is no longer able controlling everything and all, which will be used by some other companies. At least, if MSI tomorrow announces a cooperation with all who want it, nobody will be surprised by that any more. This "blurring" in priorities is only to the benefit.
Well, away with high politics and now get round to the ASUS Radeon 9800XT itself and R360 chip.
The chips in fact hasn't undergone essential changes - it is simply an overclocked version of R350, which is confirmed by ATI itself, - only the suffix has been changed in the name, but the numbering preserved. The maximum what can be changed is to eliminate a hundred or two errors in the chip topography :)
But as our all tests showed, a video card based on the "generic R350" overclocked to R360 always loses to "generic R360". What's up? If it is one and the same chip, the results should coincide. The gain is about using the dynamic overclocking and new architecture of the DDR memory. These factors just "grant" the chip those 7-8% of added performance, which give ATI the opportunity to stay in leaders before the emergence onto a new coil of arms race.
Now regarding the card itself. It is seen that Asus made a responsible approach to the release of its firstling on the base of ATI. Even if the design is reference, it is too complicated to explore and introduce amendments, but Asus dug thoroughly enough in the BIOS and created a unique utility SmartDoctor that gives the user unprecedented possibilities of fine tuning and monitoring the video card. Even though most buyers are in fact not excited about that, anyway cards of such level are not meant for "most buyers". But those who really are into such cards have been long looking forward to at least elementary functions of monitoring, control and security! Overclocking utilities of every kind have long been part of the software package bundle of any video card, but I wonder why nobody uses them :) and prefers a much more powerful RivaTuner. In this case, SmartDoctor is one of the first tools which we recommend to install as a must-have.
Asus wouldn't have been Asus if it hadn't installed its own cooling system. 99% of manufacturers of previous-level video cards based on Radeon 9800Pro have ordered supplies of the standard cooling system (except Sapphire with its Ultimate series video card), which has turned all the video cards into a uniform mass in which it is hard to tell a card apart. Actually, does in make any difference? .. all Radeon9800Pro cards are manufactured on the same conveyor .. to be more precise, on two. One conveyor produced 9800Pro 128Mb DDR, with the other producing 9800Pro 256Mb DDR2. Then, the produce was marked by "various" manufacturers and distributed among the customers.
You can't take ASUS Radeon 9800XT for anything else ... but for ASUS FX5900Ultra :-)
The light beige PCB with a copper two-fanned cooling system looks fantastic and takes up only one slot, although this fact can't be noticed at once.
One more thing - an ATI Rage Theater chip installed. Normally, low-end video cards are equipped with it. It's not much of a gameable stuff, but lets you handle home digital video. This practice was unnerving for the nervous, but the trend seems to have been overcome.
How close can the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra (NV38) announced two weeks ago catch up with today's leader? Read about it in our next review..
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