Power Consumption and Conclusions
Power Consumption
These power consumption numbers were taken without using the external power supply, as they would obviously be much less if the Asus X1800 XT TOP was not drawing from the power supply. For a good overclocking, the Asus card does use a noticeably larger amount of power, requiring about 24 watts more than the standard ATI X1800 XT at full load.
Conclusions
The Asus AX1800XT TOP graphics card is one of a few in its class that offers a lot of great in-box features as well as great performance and innovation.
Performance
The performance of the Asus AX1800 XT TOP is nearly the best we have seen on any single GPU graphics card configuration. The ATI X1800 XT and the NVIDIA 7800 GTX are pretty equal competitors when looking at their reference speeds, but with the additional 70 MHz on the core clock and 95 MHz on the memory clock, the Asus TOP revision comes out on top more often than not. But of course, we didn’t compare this card to the NVIDIA 7800 GTX 512 GPU, simply because we felt with the lack of stock on these cards over the past several weeks, it wasn’t entirely fair. We can be fairly sure that the 7800 GTX 512 would still be a bit faster than this Asus card, but not by much and not for the price differential you are going to pay over any of the currently available X1800 XT graphics cards.
Pricing and Availability
As of today, I haven’t found the Asus AX1800 XT TOP in stock anywhere. I have seen a single listing for it on ZipZoomFly’s site listed as on BackOrder. The price listed: $999! At that price, it is definitely hard to see this card as any kind of value; though to be fair Asus’ initial pricing estimates were much lower. We’ll have to wait for it to become in stock again at multiple outlets before we can fully judge the pricing on the Asus AX1800XT TOP package.
Looking at other X1800 XT cards though, we can find Asus’ own, standard X1800 XT for $515 at several places, well below the initial MSRP and well below the pricing on the 7800 GTX 512.
Final Thoughts
The Asus AX1800XT TOP is one of the fastest single GPU graphics cards we have ever tested, and the package that surrounds the card, including an external power supply, the full King Kong PC game and a USB game pad make for one of the best retail assortments we have seen. The innovations that Asus included on their TOP branded X1800 XT really do make it stand out from the crowd of reference designs, but the pricing we have seen on it will surely break some hearts, and wallets.
Be sure to use our price checking engine to find the best prices on the Asus X1800 XT, and anything else you may want to buy!
This gpu is rubbish
This gpu is rubbish