Noise, Overclocking, 2D Quality

Without ASUS SmartDoctor, the cooler of the EAX600 XT/HTVD is very loud. The noise isn’t into high frequencies, and thus is less annoying, yet it’s anyway loud. But as soon as you install SmartDoctor, the noise goes down to an acceptable level. To make the card almost perfectly silent you should play with the SmartDoctor controls – the comfort of your ears is all in your own hands.

We enjoyed overclocking this graphics card: its memory frequency grew to 440 (880DDR) MHz. Well, that’s not a thousand megahertz, but excellent, considering the PCB isn’t specially designed for such clock rates. The graphics processor sped up to 630MHz, and that’s an excellent result, too, indicating that it’s all right with ATI’s tech process.

As for 2D quality, the image was crisp in all resolutions of our Dell P1110 monitor up to 1800x1440@75Hz inclusive (with the use of an adapter as the card has a DVI output only). Unfortunately, we couldn’t test the component video output as we hadn’t appropriate display devices at our disposal. We’ll try to test it later on, though.

Testbed and Methods

We rolled out our standard testbed, configured like follows:

• Intel Pentium 4 560 (Socket 775, 3.60GHz, 1MB L2 cache);
• Intel Desktop Board D925XCV;
• 2x512MB Micron PC2-4300 (533MHz) DDR2 SDRAM;
• Samsung SpinPoint SP1213C (Serial ATA-150, 8MB buffer);
• Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 2;
• Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP2, DirectX 9.0ñ;
• ATI CATALYST 4.8, NVIDIA ForceWare 61.77.

We used the following benchmarks:

First Person 3D Shooters:

• Call of Duty;
• Doom 3;
• Unreal Tournament 2004;
• Halo: Combat Evolved;
• Far Cry;
• Painkiller.

Third Person 3D Shooters:

• Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow;
• Prince of Persia: Sands of Time;
• Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne.

Simulators:

• IL-2 Sturmovik: Aces in the Sky;
• Lock On;
• Colin McRae Rally 04.

Strategy:

• Command & Conquer Generals: Zero Hour;
• Perimeter.

Semi-Synthetic Benchmarks:

• Aquamark3.

Synthetic Benchmarks:

• Futuremark 3DMark03 build 340.

We selected the maximum possible graphics quality settings in each application – the same for cards with GPUs from ATI and NVIDIA. We enabled anisotropic and tri-linear filtering optimizations in the ForceWare driver for NVIDIA’s GPUs.