Conclusion

The ASUS EAX1800XT TOP/2DHTV graphics card has left us highly pleased, as many other cards from ASUS we’ve tested in our labs have done. Above all we liked its near silent yet very efficient cooling system. Its single drawback in comparison with the older Arctic Cooling systems is that it does not exhaust the hot air outside the PC case and thus doesn’t help improve the thermal conditions of the other system components. There shouldn’t be any trouble if your system case is ventilated well; otherwise you may have some overheat-related problems because the ATI R520 chip overclocked to 700MHz generates quite an amount of heat.

What we don’t quite understand is the purpose of the external power supply the EAX1800XT TOP comes with. This graphics card consumes a mere 7 watts more than the regular Radeon X1800 XT, and enthusiasts who buy and use such top-end graphics cards surely have high-wattage system PSUs in their computers already. On the other hand, why not? You don’t have to use the external power supply if you don’t want to, and if your system PSU isn’t powerful enough, you won’t have to buy a new one. So after all, it is not a bad thing to receive an additional power supply with the card.

The gorgeous set of accessories that the ASUS EAX1800XT TOP comes with must also be mentioned. Besides the graphics cards proper, you receive a good 10-button gamepad with feedback, very suitable for playing arcade shooters like Peter’s Jackson: King Kong, Prince of Persia or Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. You’ll also find video-editing software in the pack, although the old version of the Rage Theater chip isn’t too good at capturing video. It will do well enough, however, if you are going to convert your VHS archive into digital form. 

As for performance, we do testify to ASUS’s claim that its pre-overclocked version of the Radeon X1800 XT is 10% faster than the standard version of the card. In some cases – when the performance is limited by the number of TMUs – the EAX1800XT TOP is even faster at times than the Radeon X1900 XT. And still, though the ASUS card rightly deserves the title of the best Radeon X1800 XT, it cannot claim the name of a GeForce 7800 GTX 512 killer notwithstanding the solid GPU and memory frequency boost – it is a prerogative of the ATI Radeon X1900 family.

This is why the value of the ASUS EAX1800XT TOP/2DHTV for the potential customer is unclear. The ASUS EAX1900XT/2HDTV provides a better performance and offers a future-oriented reserve of 48 pixel processors. The rich accessories and the noiseless cooling system may be arguments in favor of the EAX1800XT TOP, yet we’d advise you to wait a little – ASUS will surely release the TOP version of the EAX1900XT/XTX one of these days.

Highs:

• High performance, mostly in Direct3D applications
• High performance with turned-on FSAA and anisotropic filtering
• High texturing speed (the higher GPU frequency makes up for the 16-to-24 difference in the number of TMUs in comparison with the GeForce 7800 GTX 512)
• Transparent textures antialiasing
• Hardware-accelerated decoding of H.264 and other HD video formats
• VIVO functionality
• Supports FSAA and HDR simultaneously
• Quiet and effective cooling system
• External power supply
• Gorgeous accessories

Lows:

• High power consumption
• Slower than the GeForce 7800 GTX 512 in OpenGL and some other applications
• Has no future perspectives after the release of the Radeon X1900
• High price