Introduction

ASUS is a relatively new ATI board partner. They only hopped onto the ATI bandwagon with the debut of the ASUS Radeon 9800 Pro range of cards.

Despite their late entry into the ATI graphics card market, ASUS' motherboard manufacturing expertise has stood them in good stead. Their graphics card line is as impressive as their motherboards.

Even as relative newcomers, ASUS is one of the very few manufacturers that do not bother following ATI's reference design. Rather, they prefer to come up with their own designs. Their graphics cards come with improved temperature and voltage monitoring abilities as well as VIVO functions that are not found in many cards from other manufacturers.

The ASUS X800 Pro

With the release of the new ATI R420 GPU, it's only natural for ASUS to release their new Radeon X800 Pro and X800 XT graphics cards. In this review, I'm going to take a look at the AGP version of the ASUS X800 Pro graphics card. This is a slightly crippled version of their ASUS X800 XT.

Retailing at USD 399 (RM 1516) when it was released, the new ASUS X800 Pro card is as expensive as the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro when it was launched during mid-2003.

Well, these two cards are not direct competitors, of course. They have very different specifications, and the X800 Pro is definitely superior to the Radeon 9800 Pro. But today, we will not only be reviewing the ASUS X800 Pro, we will also take a look at the real differences between these two cards. This will show you the kind of improvement in performance you can expect from upgrading to the X800 Pro on a mid-range Athlon XP system.