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ASUS Extreme AX1900 CrossFire 512MB Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Thursday, 30 March 2006 |
Guru3D shares a review on the ASUS Extreme AX1900 CrossFire 512MB PCIe graphics card. NVIDIA's SLI has been the company's best promotional idea since 2004. ATI on their end simply had to offer a rather bloodthirsty counter reaction which of course resulted into CrossFire. What do both solutions offer? Two graphics cards rendering these little software applications that we call games. Why two graphics cards ? There's a number of reasons actually. It's cool, flashy, a nice experience when playing games but mostly...it's annoying that you constantly have to upgrade your graphics card each year. Technology is moving so fast plus, the graphics manufacturers really love the fact that you need to buy a card each year.
 ASUS Extreme AX1900 CrossFire 512MB Review
First off, hats off to ASUS for their support in figuring out our initial problems with the mainboard. Our issue was twofold, the first mainboard had a clock issue that needed to be resolved with a new BIOS. Secondly, it had a defect preventing CrossFire to run properly. What are the odds? I mean the chances of that happening is close to none but it can happen and it happened to me. The ASUS Extreme AX1900 CrossFire edition, specifications and board layout are 100% similar to the reference Radeon X1900 XT except that it has a compositing engine that makes it a CrossFire master card.
So with that being said, the ASUS Extreme AX1900 CrossFire of course is a beast. Breathtaking stuff, really. Well, $549 is what you'll need to cough up for this ASUS Extreme AX1900 CrossFire master card. A normal Extreme AX1900 XT will cost you roughly $499. Now then, when you buy the CrossFire edition card included in the box is everything you need to get started, but no games though. ASUS makes up for it by including the USB game controller which is a robust and quite fun peripheral. The regular Radeon X1900 XT however will come with a game bundle including the blockbuster movie title King Kong.
The CrossFire experience itself, well it's difficult to form an opinion about it. Just like the high-end SLI combo's the solution is massively expensive as all the components in your PC have to be right. Especially when you are doing the high-end CrossFire setup as we have tested today. I'm not even talking about the money here but the stuff that you need to make this rig run optimally. You need the 2x PCI Express graphics slots, you need the high-end power supply and most of all do not forget you'll need the fastest processors available to feed that CrossFire driver enough data to make the cards work 100%.
No, despite the money you have to cough up and that perfect selection of components you need to make, these cards allow you to play the latest games at breathtaking framerates with options in image quality that were up-to a year or two ago previously unknown.
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