SUMMARY: Today we are looking at the two top dogs from both ATi and nVidia in the form of the Radeon 9800 XT and GeForce FX 5950 Ultra from ASUS. We pit them directly against a reference 9800 XT and an older 9800 Pro to find out who is the king of the hill in the VGA department.
With our industry pushing forward as aggressively and competitively as ever, we are amazed to see strong newcomers jumping aboard the graphics market; especially those taking the monetary risk of offering two different graphical processing technologies simultaneously. Under the recent influence of ATis impressive marketing strategies, ASUS is offering both product lines from ATi and nVidia- whilst focusing heavily on their ATi line.
With an existing abundance of video card manufactures and designers, it is not easy for one company - no matter how large - to competitively offer their own line of licensed GPU technologies. However with the right prices, bundled accessories, helpful support, useful software and great performance, its more than possible to rise to the calibre of quality that other such companies offer - and even surpass them.
With us today is ASUSs finest: the ASUS V9980U (GeForce FX 5950 Ultra) and the infamous ASUS 9800XT. Both are equipped with 256MB of onboard RAM and are backed by ASUSs award-winning GPU-cooling technology. I personally have conducted many top-of-the-line video card analyses, benchmarks and tests; throughout my time, I have acquired a sufficient amount of onboard GPU-cooling technology - and we can tell you that weve been mightily impressed with ASUS in this category so far.
Understanding its vast importance, I have recently begun to focus heavily on the unique technologies implemented by specific manufactures; when a plethora of companies are all manufacturing products based on identical technologies, they all must have their unique trademark in order to differentiate their product from another similar one. ASUS has not only made this trademark blindly apparent, but theyve incorporated their technology in such a way that truly encompasses the meaning of unique manufacturing.
Throughout this article we plan to devour both our cards and put them through the ultimate performance tests, pairing off with other cards currently available on the market.
