Asus announces X1800XT "PE"

JUST AS WE announced here, ATi's partners started to introduce X1800XT products with a higher clock than those featured on the first batch of products.

Under the name of EAX1800XT TOP, ASUS launched a custom-cooled product with clocks raised from 625 to 650 for the GPU chip, while the memory has been raised from 1.5 GHz to modest 1.55 GHz, raising a total video memory bandwidth from 48.8 to 49.6 GB/s, still 5.76 GB/s shy of top-clocked products based on "7800-U-A2" chips, for example, the GeForce 7800GTX 512MB.

The product features changed cooling, featuring an Artic Cooling design with the classical fan instead of a turbine offered on the reference cards. At first glance, this cooler is a dead-ringer of cooling used on GeForce 6800 Ultra products, and since we have seen enthusiasts putting Nvidia GeForce6/7 cooling stuff on X1800 products, we would not have been surprised if that's the case. What separates this board from other solutions is something new in the single GPU world - Asus packs an external power supply to ensure rock solid operation. First seen with its Dual 7800GT board, it seems that Asus will be using external PSU on lot of their TOP products, ensuring maximum overclockability.

The bundle is pretty rich, including brand new Peter Jackson's King Kong game - if that's not enough, there is Project Snowblind, Joint Operations, Xpand Rally and other utility software such as ASUS DVD XP (branded PowerDVD), PowerDirector, ASUS MediaShow and many other small utilities, offering quite a nice value.

One thing we can't figure out. Most of the boards the partners received clocked GPU chip above 700MHz with zero problems. Memory went to 1.7GHz with no problems, and ATI even posted that 1GHz GPU clock spin release - by crazy Finnish duo Sampsa/Ville, using LN2 cooling - showing there is plenty more headroom left both on the board and on the marchitecture itself. How come no one came up with a 700MHz GPU clock? Graphzilla's partners pushed one slot cooling all the way to 490 MHz and now 580 MHz, all having an 110nm chip at their hands. ATI uses a 90 nanometre CPU capable of getting to 1GHz. What's going on?

L'INQ
Asus Chinese web site