ASUS RADEON 9800 XT/TDV

ASUS Company announced their cooperation with ATI the same day as the new RADEON 9800 XT and RADEON 9600 XT were released. As a result, there appeared a totally new graphics card family from ASUS based on the ATI chips, which included not only the brand new models, but the entire product range starting with RADEON 9200 and finishing with the latest RADEON 9800 XT.

In our test session the ATI RADEON 9800 XT chip will be represented by a product from ATI’s new partner aka ASUS RADEON 9800 XT/TVD:

The carton box with the graphics card is simply huge. To really feel how big it is, take a look at the box shot with the open top: there is a transparent window where the graphics card actually is:

The PCB of the new ASUS solution is slightly different from ATI’s own reference design:

The cooling solution consists of a dual-fan cooler covering the graphics chip and the memory on the front side of the PCB and a copper plate taking the heat off the memory chips on the reverse side of the card PCB:

By the way, the heatsink on the front side of the PCB is not made of solid copper, as you might have thought at first sight. This heatsink basically has a copper plate with a heat pipe stuck to it and aluminum heatsinks screwed to the plate with small screws:

This cooler seems to be a really efficient one, however, it is noticeably noisier than the reference card cooler.