ASUS EAX1950PRO 256MB RV570
Performance:
As we have seen when reviewing other ASUS products they are known to pack in a great deal of extras. Among the ASUS software innovations with the EAX1950PRO are ASUS Splendid, Video Security Online, Game LiveShow, Game Replay, Game FaceMessenger, and OnScreenDisplay. These innovations are software based and solely available for Microsoft Windows.
The latest ATI fglrx Linux display driver available at the time of publishing is version 8.31.5. However, these drivers do not yet support the Radeon X1950 family. Radeon X1950 owners using the 8.31.5 drivers can use the ChipID argument in /etc/X11/xorg.conf to fake the Chipset as a Radeon X1900, but will lack 3D acceleration support. We, however, are fortunate enough to have our hands on the 8.32.1 beta display driver. The fglrx 8.32 driver appends full support for the Radeon X1950 series. Owners of the X1950 can look for these drivers to turn up before the start of the New Year. For having our first look at the X1950PRO under GNU/Linux, we had compared the ASUS EAX1950PRO against the ASUS EAX1300PRO 256MB, ATI (Built by ATI) X1800XL 256MB, and ATI (Sapphire) X1800XT 256MB. Below is the run-down of other components used during the testing process.
| Hardware Components | |
| Processor: | AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ |
| Motherboard: | Abit KN9 Ultra |
| Memory: | 2 x 1GB OCZ DDR2-1000 |
| Graphics Card: | ATI Radeon X1300PRO 256MB ATI Radeon X1800XL 256MB ATI Radeon X1800XT 256MB ATI Radeon X1950PRO 256MB |
| Hard Drives: | Seagate 160GB SATA2 7200.9 |
| Optical Drives: | Lite-On 16x DVD-ROM |
| Cooling: | OCZ Tempest |
| Power Supply: | SilverStone Zeus ST75ZF 750W |
| Software Components | |
| Operating System: | Fedora Core 6 |
| Linux Kernel: | 2.6.18-1.2849.fc6 SMP (i686) |
| GCC: | 4.1.1 |
| Graphics Driver: | ATI/AMD fglrx 8.32.1 (Beta) |
| X.Org: | 7.1.1 |
Our test selection for the EAX1950PRO review consisted of Enemy Territory, Doom 3, Quake 4, and SPECViewPerf 9.0. The first three benchmarks of course represent our traditional gaming tests while SPECViewPerf was thrown in to compare workstation rendering performance. If you are new to GNU/Linux, we would highly recommend checking out the Redblog and our other graphics articles. While ATI has made a light and day difference between their current fglrx drivers and those from over a year ago when they were largely plagued by bugs, the frame-rate performance continues to suffer in comparison to NVIDIA's proprietary driver. However, the fglrx drivers continue to improve and in 2007 there should be some interesting developments coming out of the ATI/AMD camp. With that said, on the following pages are our benchmark results.