Power Consumption

We were very curious to see how much power was needed for an ASUS EAX1800XT TOP, now that the card comes with an external power supply. How much more than the standard Radeon X1800 XT does it consume? The power consumption measurements were performed on a special testbed with the following configuration:

• Intel Pentium 4 560 CPU (3.60GHz, 1MB L2 cache)
• Intel Desktop Board D925XCV (modified)
• 2 x 512MB PC4300 DDR2 SDRAM
• Samsung SpinPoint SP1213C hard disk drive (Serial ATA-150, 8MB buffer)
• Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP2, DirectX 9.0c
• ATI Catalyst 6.1, Nvidia ForceWare 81.98

We measured the power consumption of the cards with a digital multimeter Velleman DVM850BL (0.5% measurement accuracy). To put a Peak 3D load on the card we ran the first SM 3.0 graphics test from 3DMark06 in a loop at 1600x1200 resolution and with enabled 4x full-screen antialiasing and 16x anisotropic filtering. Then we created an extremely high 2D load by launching the 2D Transparent Windows test from Futuremark PCMark05. Idle Mode means that the graphics card was just showing the Windows XP Desktop and the computer wasn’t running any resource-consuming applications. Here are the results:

Against our expectations, we don’t anything extraordinary here. The graphics card from ASUS consumes about as much power as the newer Radeon X1900 XT. The latter has 48 pixel processors, but works at lower frequencies. The power consumption grew a mere 7W above that of the Radeon X1800 XT, which is not much at all.

There is obviously no need for the external power supply if you’ve got a good-quality 450W PSU in your system. But if your system PSU cannot stand a high load on the +12V line for long or if its wattage is below 400W, the external power supply may save you the trouble of upgrading your PSU to use the EAX1800XT TOP graphics card.

We don’t think this is a likely scenario, however, because high-end computers that high-performance graphics cards like the ASUS EAX1800XT TOP are bought for surely have a high-wattage and reliable PSU.

Noise, Overclocking, 2D Quality

As we had anticipated, the cooling system of the ASUS EAX1800XT TOP proved to be near silent thanks to the Arctic Cooling blower that works on quiet bearings and features an optimal design of the blades. We haven’t seen too many silent graphics cards in our tests, but this one is among them. You shouldn’t worry at all that the EAX1800XT TOP may disturb your quiet.

Dealing with a pre-overclocked product, we hadn’t expected the EAX1800XT TOP to be any good at overclocking. And that was true: the card was only stable at 730/1720MHz. Such a small frequency growth cannot affect the card’s performance much, so we didn’t test it at overclocked frequencies. This is certainly not an overclocker-targeted product after all.

Like the overwhelming majority of today’s graphics cards that follow the reference design and belong to a high enough class, the ASUS EAX1800XT TOP delivered an excellent 2D image quality in all display modes available with our laboratory monitors, up to 1800x1440@75Hz. We couldn’t see any undesired artifacts like fuzzy text or shadowing on the screen.