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ASUS Extreme AX1900 CrossFire Edition Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Sunday, 23 April 2006 |
Digit-Life reveals a review on the ASUS Extreme AX1900 CrossFire Edition graphics card. First of all, all experienced users know well that video cards of the Radeon X1900 XT/XTX level are manufactured on third-party plants, ordered by ATI. That's why any ATI partner has nothing to do with their manufacturing. All vendors, including ASUS, buy ready cards from ATI and just sell them under their brands. The Radeon X1900 CrossFire edition is based upon the R580 core and comes clocked at 625/1450MHz, just like the XT version. The CrossFire video card has 512MB of Samsung high speed GDDR3 memory which are rated at 1.2ns. This means that these memory chips have an maximum operation speed of 1600MHz.
 ASUS Extreme AX1900 CrossFire Edition Review
First of all we can see that CrossFire really works with low-end cards, which do not require being connected with a special adapter or a master card. Performance gains are evident. We still have some questions, like how many games? And how they are supported by this technology on the whole? Unfortunately, the biggest pile of games do not have benchmarks, so we can evaluate CrossFire operation only by eye. We can only trust ATI, who claims that CrossFire works in all games by default and that driver profiles only raise efficiency of this technology.
For our CrossFire config we have linked it up with an ASUS Extreme AX1900 XTX 512MB. This is a standard Radeon X1900 XTX reference card. The bundle is very nice. The card itself is of excellent quality, no gripes. Some users complain about occasional overheating, that's true. If you want to buy such a card, you should provide good ventilation inside your PC case. And forget your dreams about a quiet system unit with the fastest accelerator inside. This is possible only with the GeForce 7900 GTX, but its price is currently higher, so the Radeon X1900 XTX is at advantage now.
The ASUS Extreme AX1900 CrossFire 512MB is a standard product. The bundle is even more interesting, the gaming pad is quite nice. Remember that the master cards don't bears any suffix, not XTX nor XT. So even if you install the XTX card together with this model, the tandem will operate at CrossFire frequencies anyway, which is 625/1450MHz. Of course there is always some room for overclocking, but keep in mind that a CrossFire setup will always generate more heat then a single Radeon X1900 configuration.
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