The package of ASUS RADEON 9800 XT/TVD contains everything you might need to work with a graphics card: a set of brochures, CD-disks with the drivers and utilities including PowerDirector 2.55 ME and MediaShow SE 2.0 from Cyberlink , Ulead Cool 3D SE 3.0 and Ulead Photo Express 4.0.

To connect the additional peripherals for work with Video signals, ASUS provides a special adapter with two RCA connectors and two S-Video connectors:

In conclusion to this part of our coverage I would like to say that the graphics card from ASUS is equipped with very well-thought hardware monitoring features. Their brand name SmartDoctor utility informs the user about the graphics chip and memory temperatures and voltages, tracks AGP voltage and fan rotation speeds and allows setting some limit values for them, notifying the user once they get surpassed. Besides that, SmartDoctor also allows setting clock frequencies for the VPU and graphics memory and resets them to defaults automatically in case of overheating. At last, if quiet operation is what you value most, there are two ways to control the rotation speeds of the cooler fans: by setting a certain rotation speed or by enabling automatic fan rotation speed management depending on the core temperature.

Unfortunately, you will be able to enjoy this whole features set only if you have an ASUS graphics card. On ATI’s graphics card the SmartDoctor utility will not work at all. However, the standard OVERDRIVE function from Catalyst 3.8 control panel, which we have already discussed above, also refused to work on ASUS RADEON 9800 XT/TVD card.

As for the performance of ASUS RADEON 9800 XT/TVD compared with that of the reference card from ATI, there are no surprises here: when working at nominal frequencies, both cards demonstrate almost the same performance results.

Well, let’s get down to the most exciting part: the benchmarks!

Testbed and Methods

Our testbed was configured as follows:

• Intel Pentium4 3000MHz CPU;
• ASUS P4C800 (i875) mainboard;
• 2 x 512MB DDR SDRAM PC3200 CL2.5 from TwinMOS.

We used the following software:

• Microsoft Windows XP Pro SP1;
• DirectX 9.0b;
• Catalyst driver version 3.8 for ATI RADEON 9800 XT;
• ForceWare (Detonator) driver version 52.16 for NVIDIA GeForce FX 5950 Ultra.

The anisotropic filtering settings and texture level of detail were set to Quality for all graphics cards tested.