Asus Extreme AX1800XT TOP

Whereas ATI's reference design cools the GPU with a blower-style cooler that draws air across the chip from the case, exhausting it from your chassis, Asus has engineered a cooler that circulates in-chassis air and pushes it out over the voltage regulators, much like an Nvidia reference cooler does.

The fan's design means it's much quieter than the reference cooler and despite circulating warm air exchanged from the GPU by the cooler to the chassis, it still cools better than the reference cooler does, according to our tests. You'll also spot is a similar power system to the Extreme N7800GT Dual. That's right, the Extreme AX1800XT TOP ships with its own power supply, Asus deciding to use one to provide spot-on power at the pre-overclocked levels the card ships at. More on both of those things in due course.

The end result is that it's a fair bit bigger than a reference X1800 XT, making it unsuitable for some PC cases. On top of that, the card isn't the easiest to install due to what we think is a poor bracket design, retained by only a single screw mount. That single screw hole and the strength of the metal mean the heavy card will bow down towards the bottom of the chassis it's in, presumably putting more stress than you'd like on the PCB area around the PCI Express interface pins.

Furthermore, if you have a tool-free chassis that uses clips to retain the add-in boards, you might also be out of luck with this product, even if you have the room for it. A two-slot product, just like the reference design, the Extreme AX1800XT TOP is a bit of beast in terms of its physical attributes.

The backplane shows you the port for the external power supply, along with the pair of DVI ports that each can carry a dual-link digital signal for driving large digital displays. We didn't have a hard time imagining the Extreme AX1800XT TOP driving a pair of those new Dell 30in LCD behemoths, for example. Video output is taken care of with a port that'll output S-video, composite or component video depending on the cable you attach to it.

You can see how much further past the regular ATX backplane space the Extreme AX1800XT TOP protrudes, too. It's a tall, long, wide bit of kit.