Virtual-Hideout | ASUS EAH3850 X2 1GB Graphics Card Review

A Closer Look:

Front View	Back View	ASUS Logo
Dual Logo	Rear air vent	PCI poer connection

OK, with the box open and the card out of the plastic static bag, we can truly see that this card is large, but not a beast after all. The overall look of the card is simple - not sporting any fancy graphics or stickers. A large, black, aluminum heatsink spans the entire length of the card, but it's not providing any cooling, as is apparent by its lack of contact with any components or heatpipes. Instead, it serves as a bracket for the dual fans. The dual fans sit over individual radiators that have a dual copper heatpipe system going through them. Each set of heatpipes are soldered to their own copper heatsink. The copper heatsinks are what actually cool the GPU and the RAM.

Rear View	Side View of Heatsink
Heatpipes and Heatsink	Dual Fans

On the top are two PCI-E power connectors: one is six pin, and the other one is an eight pin. After doing some research, you can plug in two 6pin cables from the PSU to the card. However, if you intend to use Crossfire or overclock, then use the 8-pin connector along with the 6-pin. The back side of the card has the remaining RAM chips, which do not have heatsinks on them. The RAM chips used are from Qimonda and have the following specs: GDDR3 512Mb, 16Mx32, 1.0GHz, 2.0V. The card has a total of 1GB of RAM, and each GPU uses 512MB.

On the bracket portion of the card, two DVI connections are present along with a HDTV port. Included with the ASUS EAH3850 X2 is the software installation disk and manual, DVI to HDMI adapter, DVI to D-Sub adapter, Crossfire bridge, PCI-E power adapter, RGB cable, and a leather CD wallet.

Here is the GPU information from the ATI website.

666 million transistors on 55nm fabrication process
PCI Express 2.0 x16 bus interface⁵
256-bit GDDR3/GDDR4 memory interface
Ring Bus Memory Controller
- Fully distributed design with 512-bit internal ring bus for memory reads and writes
Microsoft® DirectX® 10.1 support
- Shader Model 4.1
- 32-bit floating point texture filtering
- Indexed cube map arrays
- Independent blend modes per render target
- Pixel coverage sample masking
- Read/write multi-sample surfaces with shaders
- Gather4 texture fetching
Unified Superscalar Shader Architecture
- 320 stream processing units
  - Dynamic load balancing and resource allocation for vertex, geometry, and pixel shaders
  - Common instruction set and texture unit access supported for all types of shaders
  - Dedicated branch execution units and texture address processors
- 128-bit floating point precision for all operations
- Command processor for reduced CPU overhead
- Shader instruction and constant caches
- Up to 80 texture fetches per clock cycle
- Up to 128 textures per pixel
- Fully associative multi-level texture cache design
- DXTC and 3Dc+ texture compression
- High resolution texture support (up to 8192 x 8192)
- Fully associative texture Z/stencil cache designs
- Double-sided hierarchical Z/stencil buffer
- Early Z test, Re-Z, Z Range optimization, and Fast Z Clear
- Lossless Z & stencil compression (up to 128:1)
- Lossless color compression (up to 8:1)
- 8 render targets (MRTs) with anti-aliasing support
- Physics processing support
Dynamic Geometry Acceleration
- High performance vertex cache
- Programmable tessellation unit
- Accelerated geometry shader path for geometry amplification
- Memory read/write cache for improved stream output performance
Anti-aliasing features
- Multi-sample anti-aliasing (2, 4, or 8 samples per pixel)
- Up to 24x Custom Filter Anti-Aliasing (CFAA) for improved quality
- Adaptive super-sampling and multi-sampling
- Temporal anti-aliasing
- Gamma correct
- Super AA (ATI CrossFire™ configurations only)
- All anti-aliasing features compatible with HDR rendering
Texture filtering features
- 2x/4x/8x/16x high quality adaptive anisotropic filtering modes (up to 128 taps per pixel)
- 128-bit floating point HDR texture filtering
- Bicubic filtering
- sRGB filtering (gamma/degamma)
- Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF)
- Depth & stencil texture (DST) format support
- Shared exponent HDR (RGBE 9:9:9:5) texture format support
OpenGL 2.0 support
ATI Avivo™ HD Video and Display Platform
- Dedicated unified video decoder (UVD) for H.264/AVC and VC-1 video formats
  - High definition (HD) playback of both Blu-ray and HD DVD formats
- Hardware MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and DivX video decode acceleration
  - Motion compensation and IDCT
- ATI Avivo Video Post Processor
  - Color space conversion
  - Chroma subsampling format conversion
  - Horizontal and vertical scaling
  - Gamma correction
  - Advanced vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing
  - De-blocking and noise reduction filtering
  - Detail enhancement
  - Inverse telecine (2:2 and 3:2 pull-down correction)
  - Bad edit correction
- Two independent display controllers
  - Drive two displays simultaneously with independent resolutions, refresh rates, color controls and video overlays for each display
  - Full 30-bit display processing
  - Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion
  - Spatial/temporal dithering provides 30-bit color quality on 24-bit and 18-bit displays
  - High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all display outputs
  - Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays
  - Fast, glitch-free mode switching
  - Hardware cursor
- Two integrated dual-link DVI display outputs
  - Each supports 18-, 24-, and 30-bit digital displays at all resolutions up to 1920x1200 (single-link DVI) or 2560x1600 (dual-link DVI)²
  - Each includes a dual-link HDCP encoder with on-chip key storage for high resolution playback of protected content³
- Two integrated 400 MHz 30-bit RAMDACs
  - Each supports analog displays connected by VGA at all resolutions up to 2048x1536²
- DisplayPort output support⁴
  - Supports 24- and 30-bit displays at all resolutions up to 2560x1600²
- HDMI output support
  - Supports all display resolutions up to 1920x1080²
  - Integrated HD audio controller with multi-channel (5.1) AC3 support, enabling a plug-and-play cable-less audio solution
- Integrated AMD Xilleon™ HDTV encoder
  - Provides high quality analog TV output (component/S-video/composite)
  - Supports SDTV and HDTV resolutions
  - Underscan and overscan compensation
- MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264/AVC encoding and transcoding
- Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time
- VGA mode support on all display outputs
ATI PowerPlay™
- Advanced power management technology for optimal performance and power savings
- Performance-on-Demand
  - Constantly monitors GPU activity, dynamically adjusting clocks and voltage based on user scenario
  - Clock and memory speed throttling
  - Voltage switching
  - Dynamic clock gating
- Central thermal management – on-chip sensor monitors GPU temperature and triggers thermal actions as required
ATI CrossFireX™ Multi-GPU Technology
- Scale up rendering performance and image quality with two, three, or four GPUs
- Integrated compositing engine
- High performance dual channel bridge interconnect