A Closer Look:

Top View	Loud Fan	Back View
PCI-E Power	Dual DVI	The NEW CF Connection

   The rest of the ASUS EAX1650XT 256MB has some other features which are normally found on higher end cards, even what you might see on a SLI card. The first thing is this ASUS EAX1650XT needs some external power. YUP, a mid-level card requiring PCI-E power. Next is the set of contacts on the upper front portion of the card. Hells bells, you say, this isn't a SLI card, it's a Crossfire card. Well, settle down there bub... it's yet another way to connect two of the same cards. The **50XT cards will still have a standard card and a CF card, but the CF card will just have a two piece CrossFire bridge. Other than that, the cards should be identical. For monitor connections, the card has dual DVI with DVI to VGA adapters included, along with a video out connection.

RV560

RV560 close up

    Now, let's get a closer look at the actual GPU. Here we can see the RV560 core, code 215PAGAKA12FG. The RV560 is a 80 nanometer semiconductor with 12 pipes and 256 bit memory support, and clocks in at 574MHz. Some of the other features include 24 pixel shader processors, 8 vertex shader processors, 10-bit color processing, HDCP support, and Dual-Link DVI support. Not to mention, this GPU is faster than the previous 90nm semiconductor, which clocked in at 475MHz. Keep in mind that the 574MHz is the stock core speed of the RV560 and not an overclocked RV530.

Fan top view

Copper side

    Sitting on top of the RV560 GPU is copper heatsink with an integrated fan. The fan pulls in case air from the top and as the fan spins, it forces the air out through an opening of copper fins. Most of this heatsink fan is enclosed in black plastic. On a downside note, the fan is extremely loud; it's the loudest thing in my computer. Another bit of information on this heatsink: none of it comes in contact with the RAM.

    More on the RAM: the modules used are Qimonda HYB18H512321AF-14 . Qimonda is a division of Infineon, a company well known for making graphics card RAM. The Infineon 512-Mbit GDDR3 Graphics RAM is a high speed memory device, designed for high-bandwidth, intensive applications like PC graphics systems. The chip’s 8 bank architecture is optimized for high speed. HYB18H512321AF uses a double data rate interface and a 4n-prefetch architecture. The GDDR3 interface transfers two 32 bit wide data words per clock cycle to and from the I/O pins. Corresponding to the 4n-prefetch a single write or read access consists of a 128 bit wide, one-clock-cycle data transfer at the internal memory core and four corresponding 32 bit wide, one-half-clock-cycle data transfers at the I/O pins.  

CrossFire:

   A CrossFire-capable adapter is here, using the recently introduced internal system rather than the much-maligned external dongle. There's no need for a special CrossFire Edition of the X1650XT; instead, identical cards are used and interconnected together with the new CrossFire Bridge.

To enable CrossFire™ function System requirements: 1. A standard ASUS EAX1650XT graphics card 2. An additional ASUS EAX1650XT CrossFire™ edition graphics card (with two pieces of CrossFire bridge interconnectors inside the box) 3. A CrossFire™ Ready motherboard 4. 512MB of system memory Power Supply Requirements: 1. 450-Watt power supply or greater, 30 Amps, 12 volt rail is recommended (assumes fully loaded system) 2. For CrossFire™: 550 watt power supply or greater, 38 Amps, 12 volt rail Two pieces of CrossFire bridge interconnectors inside the EAX1650XT CrossFire box CrossFire mode demonstration

   With Splendid Video Intelligence Technology, found exclusively in ASUS solutions, images processed by ASUS graphics cards are enhanced and fine tuned to deliver the most vibrant visual representations all conditions. Splendid dynamically adjusts color, brightness, sharpness and contrast to deliver video quality comparable to those on the very best TVs.

    Using Avivo(tm) technology, the ATI Radeon X1650 XT provides incredible quality video playback for today's high-definition media formats, displaying one billion colors, or 10-bit throughout the graphics pipeline . The new card is HDCP-compliant, including a built-in EEPROM and HDCP key. The ATI Radeon X1650 XT is also ready for Windows Vista^(tm) with Windows Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL) certified drivers from AMD, in order to give users the complete Windows Vista experience, including the Aero^(tm) interface.