ASUS' Extreme high-end: ASUS EN6800 Ultra, EN6800 GT, EAX850 XT PE, and EAX800 XL
Introduction
A high-end board itself arouses at least curiosity, and genuine connoisseurs (who you and we certainly are) find it of specific interest. What is we take more than one cards? And not by a noname but one by an eminent manufacturer like ASUS? That's right - that is what we are going to verify in our today's material.
The "elite video accelerators" by both industry leaders - NVIDIA Corporation and ATI Technologies, astounding speeds with more astounding prices, the luxury exterior and package bundle - all that is within ASUS' very close attention. And that is a good job in it - a diamond should have a precious casing which holds true for not only precious stone (I don't see any sense at all in purchasing this stuff, unlike the games so akin to our hearts , of which we are talking about). But let's finish with analogies and prefaces and immediately get down to business.
All the participants of our today's "round" offer recommended core and memory speeds and the specified number of pipelines, there are even no differences in the PCB design as well. Of course, Asus has certainly introduced some "amendments". First, it is the package bundle. For instance, along with the web camera future lucky owners of EN6800Ultra will get DOOM3 on 3 CDs as a bonus item. Of the remaining nontrivial components is only the CD-Case (comes as a bundle item to each board).
Along with these, we note the qualitative modernization of cooling systems on all the cards except EAX850XT PE (which in fact is a reference board). On EN6800Ultra/GT, that is a copper radiator on the GPU (instead of aluminum one on the reference), whereas on EAX800 XL the cooling system is made as a copper radiator that cools the GPU and four video memory chips on the board's front side.
Let's turn to EAX850 XT PE once more. We all remember Radeon 9800XT by ASUS, with its own ÐÑÂ design. Unfortunately, at that ASUS' experiments with high-end solutions on ATI chips ended. Both the AGP flagship model AX800XT PE and the previous top-end PCI-E (ÅAX800 XT) card were based on ATI's reference design, with the difference in that the textolyte color was traditionally orange. This time, we have got an absolute reference card. I don't think that is a minus or may seriously hinder the performance. Moreover, the reference cooling system installed on RX850 XT PE has undergone quite substantial changes as compared to the previous flagship solutions (it's the first time ATI uses a dual-slot design for the cooling system) and is rather efficient.
The thing is, manufacturing companies buy from ATI (like from NVIDIA) not merely chips but ready cards, and although the textolyte color differs from the reference, that doesn't mean anything at all. Then, there goes "faceting" the cards with cooling systems, rich package bundle and nice-looking box added, and ... here they are - ready-made "cakes for sale".
In our today's roundup session, only these four boards will take part. Remember that 6800Ultra's direct competitor is X850 XT PE, with X800 XL being positioned versus 6800GT. As regards the prices, the most top-end cards are priced at approximately the same level which starts with $550. As regards the "6800GT-X800XL" pair, the first one currently leads (from 450$ onwards). At that optimistic note, I suggest that we should move on the considering the most vital point on the agenda - the cards themselves.
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