HotHardware reviews ASUS EAX1950 CROSSFIRE and EAX1950PRO
While NVIDIA is marching forward with its DirectX 10 capable GeForce 8800 series, ATI is still mum on their next generation graphics cards. Which is somewhat surprising, as one would think this time of year would be ideal for new product announcements.
But while Vista is due for a broad release in January '07, games that fully exploit the features of DirectX 10 won't be commonplace for quite some time. The rest of the market is still full of great material that is OpenGL or DirectX 9-based leaving the current line of ATI graphics cards as a viable options for all but the most demanding of enthusiasts.
Today, we are going to evaluate two cards from ASUS built around ATI's X1950 GPU. The first graphics card is the EAX1950CROSSFIRE/HP/512M which comes with an X1950XTX GPU and 512MB of GDDR4 memory for the best performance ATI currently has to offer. The next model is a slightly scaled down EAX1950PRO/HTDP/256M which brings a more affordable mid-range solution with an X1950Pro at the core and 256MB of GDDR3 memory. In the pages ahead, we're going to assess the overall features and performance of each card and then weigh in with our opinion on Asus two latest ATI-centric creations. Aside from DirectX 10 support, these cards pack a punch in more way than one, so let's get started...
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