Closer Look

The ASUS Extreme AX600 XT/HTVD graphics card is rather unusual in its appearance: although its design seems to be identical to the reference one, it’s not really so.

The Rage Theater chip and a scattering of its small companions catch the eye, but it’s not the main deviation from ATI’s reference card. You may note that there’s a non-standard gray connector instead of an ordinary 15-pin D-Sub plug. It is the connector devices with a component input should use (TV-sets, plasma panels and video projectors). This is an arguable solution as the card now cannot work with two monitors simultaneously; you can only attach a monitor and an YPbPr device to it at the same time. The approach of NVIDIA and S3 Graphics looks more logical in this respect: an YPbPr splitter is attached to a special round-shaped video connector and the two outputs to monitors (DVI and D-Sub) remain where they belong. ATI Technologies also has it in a logical way – devices with a component video input are supposed to connect to D-Sub of the DVI connector via a special adapter. So, whatever the reason for ASUS’ solution, one of the standard monitor outputs of the Extreme AX600 XT/HTVD is replaced with a connector for an YPbPr splitter and this deprives this card of the support of multi-monitor configurations.

The back side of the card’s PCB also deviates from the etalon, probably due to the exclusive hardware monitoring and fan control system. Otherwise, the design is the same as ATI developed it for its RADEON X600 XT.

The cooling system of the Extreme AX600 AX/HTVD is simple: a small aluminum heatsink with curved ribs is mounted on the GPU and four memory chips on the face side of the board. Some thermoplastic stuff is used as an interface between the GPU and the heatsink foot; the memory transfers its heat to the heatsink via white rubber-like pads, like in many other modern graphics cards. Again, like in many graphics cards, the memory on the back side of the PCB isn’t cooled at all, and this reduces the overall cooling efficiency. Well, nearly every manufacturer is guilty of that – few of them do install heatsinks on the backside memory chips, although it wouldn’t increase the cost of the end product much.

The axis of the fan does not coincide with the GPU die; instead, the fan is driving the air stream towards the die. This rather rare solution is justifiable because if the fan is placed right above the GPU, a dead zone without any airflow is made up, which reduces the cooling efficiency.

The heatsink is covered with an air-directing, ASUS-logo-bearing casing made of transparent plastic. This casing is removable – you can easily pull it up off the heatsink. This may be intended for an easy dusting of the heatsink, but few people ever do this operation with graphics cards. The fan is equipped with blue highlighting – this seems to have become another ASUS’ tradition.

As for the technical characteristics, they are up to the title “Extreme” in the product’s full name. For example, the memory from Hynix installed on the PCB has an access time of 2 nanoseconds rather than 2.5, as usual. Theoretically this should result in the memory’s ability to be stable at 500 (1000DDR) MHz. We hadn’t expected to see such fast memory on a graphics card from the RADEON X600 XT family, frankly speaking. On the other hand, the low access time doesn’t guarantee you a frequency of 1 gigahertz as the relatively simple PCB design may become an obstacle to that. Well, we will only know for sure after we have tried (see the next section of the review). The default frequency of the memory is 370 (740DDR) MHz which is slightly above the standard memory frequency of RADEON X600 XT cards. The graphics core is clocked at 500MHz, as usual.