Life Digital

As I have already mentioned above, only the 9800 GX2 and 9800 GTX cards copy the reference design. So we won't examine them in detail again, as we have already published reviews of 9800GX2 and 9800 GTX. Just note that ASUS products are factory-overclocked. Other cards are also very interesting.

Let's take a look at the 3850 card with 1 GB of memory and an original button on the bracket, which raises GPU voltage and turns on DVI port LEDs. Frankly speaking, the idea to illuminate ports has never crossed my mind, so ASUS impressed me here. Still, this feature is of little interest as PC enclosures usually have interfaces pointing at the wall, preventing you from seeing any illumination. Besides, it's only one port, the second is connected to the monitor.



What else there is about this card, except for its cooling system? It was very silly to equip it with slow DDR2 memory, paring down memory bandwidth that radically. As a result, the card might not be able to fully use 1 GB it has. We'll get back to this later, when we analyze test results.

The 3850 X2 is a complete copy of ASUS 3870 X2. The latter had four connectors (two GPUs with two connectors each) as well as a noisy cooler. The 3850 X2 modification lost two additional DVIs (there are empty seats for these elements on the PCB) and got a slower and quieter cooler. Everything else is the same.

The noiseless GeForce 9600 GT has also been designed by ASUS. Along with a custom cooler it features a custom PCB with memory chips circling the GPU on both PCB sides.

All cards except 9800 GX2 have original TV-Out interfaces that require a special adapter to output video to a TV set via S-Video or RCA.

An analog monitor with a D-Sub (VGA) interface can be connected by means of a special DVI-to-D-Sub adapter. Also bundled are DVI-to-HDMI adapters (these graphics cards support video/audio output to HDMI receivers), so there should be no problems with such monitors.

Maximum resolutions and frequencies:

*240 Hz maximum refresh rate
*2048 x 1536 x 32bit @ 85Hz Max - analog interface
*2560 x 1600 @ 60Hz Max - digital interface (all Dual-Link DVIs)
*As of MPEG2 playback (DVD-Video), we analyzed this issue in 2002. Little has changed since that time. CPU load during video playback on modern graphics cards does not exceed 25%.

As of HDTV, a review is available here.

All cards require additional power source, so each is bundled with a molex to 6-pin adapter, even though all modern PSUs have such cables.

INFO FROM digit-life.com