LOSTCIRCUITS

Summary

One of the most earth-shaking turnarounds in the graphics adapter scene has been the announcement by ASUS to support the latest graphics cores made by ATI. Needless to say that ASUS as the number one graphics card manufacturer in the world (in volume) can also throw in a wealth of experience with respect to hardware and driver customization.

The result is a graphics card that is studded with features, comes with an extravagant bundle and further offers blistering performance. And it costs less than US$50.-

Just kidding.

It would, however, not be ASUS if they didn't debut their new line of graphics adapter with at least the flagship GPU, that is the R360 to support the ASUS RADEON 9800XT, quite likely one of the finest graphics adapters available.

Shadowplays on ASUS

ASUS graphics cards have always had this extra little something, either with respect to the feature set or else regarding the cooling solution, just remember the GeForce4 Ti4600 with its 16 ounces of copper to keep the beast cool. Likewise, ASUS cards have always had that extra feature in their drivers, at least, they would sport a different GUI around the .inf files. On a side note, this peculiarity sometimes made the updates a bit treacherous, that is, nVidia released new drivers and all of a sudden, all those nice features were gone.

The RADEON 9800xt follows the ASUS tradition in bringing to the table a bit more than what the competition has to offer. That is, in all modesty, the bit here is a lot, only question is, how much of the additional feature set is useful for the standard end-user?

Let's take it one step at the time. We have looked at the R360 GPU already in our preview, even though it was based only on a PowerPoint presentation and without the real silicon at hand. As we outlined, one key feature of the new 9800 XT series is the dynamic overclocking, a feature that plays right into ASUS' hands since they already had similar features exactly 4 years ago with their V6600 based on the GeForce 256. In this case, however, built-in overclocking is not merely one particular third party vendor going their own way but it is officially condoned by ATI. Otherwise, the 9800XT is merely an evolutionary step-up from the original RADEON 9800 based on the R350 core.

But that's without the ASUS features.

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