Asus EAX1600PRO and EN7600GT - HDMI On Tap

ASUS EAX1600PRO/I/256M/A The little engine that could

The EAX1600PRO/I/256M/A is a half-height card, which makes it well suited for installation into a standard size PC, or possibly a slim-line HTPC.  With the GPU and memory both running at 400MHz, it doesn't take much more than the small heatsink/fan to keep things running cool.  We'd almost expect that Asus could have even gone so far as to employ a completely passive cooling method, which would have cut down on power consumption and noise output, but the setup as it is helped us out with overclocking, as you will see later on in the review.  To keep things streamlined, 256MB of Infineon GDDR3 memory are placed towards the far end of the card, with 2 chips on each side.

Silicon Image's Sil1930 ASIC provides the HDMI output, and with it an integrated HDCP cipher engine with HDCP repeater function support.  The Sil1930 offers a fully compliant HDMI output capable of supporting video resolutions up to UXGA and 1080p with up to eight channels of 192kHz audio. To ensure compatibility with a broad range of PC audio hardware platforms, the Sil1930 supports a wide variety of audio interfaces - including HD-Audio, SPDIF and three I2S channels.  To minimize the stature of the EAX1600PRO, Asus makes the S/PDIF port optional, allowing the user to unplug the attached cable and use a smaller bracket with only the HDMI and VGA outputs available. 

ASUS EAX1600PRO /I/256M/A Features & Specifications

Features - ATI Radeon X1600 . 157 million transistors on 90nm fabrication process . Twelve pixel shader processors . Five vertex shader processors . 128-bit 4-channel DDR/DDR2/GDDR3/GDDR4 memory interface . Native PCI Express x16 bus interface . Dynamic Voltage Control Ring Bus Memory Controller . 256-bit internal ring bus for memory reads . Programmable intelligent arbitration logic . Fully associative texture, color, and Z/stencil cache designs . Hierarchical Z-buffer with Early Z test . Lossless Z Compression (up to 48:1) . Fast Z-Buffer Clear . Z/stencil cache optimized for real-time shadow rendering Ultra-Threaded Shader Engine . Support for Microsoft DirectX 9.0 Shader Model 3.0 programmable vertex and pixel shaders in hardware . Full speed 128-bit floating point processing for all shader operations . Dedicated branch execution units for high performance dynamic branching and flow control . Dedicated texture address units for improved efficiency . 3Dc+ texture compression _o High quality 4:1 compression for normal maps and two-channel data formats _o High quality 2:1 compression for luminance maps and single-channel data formats . Multiple Render Target (MRT) support . Render to vertex buffer support . Complete feature set also supported in OpenGL 2.0 Advanced Image Quality Features . 64-bit floating point HDR rendering supported throughout the pipeline _o Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing . 32-bit integer HDR (10:10:10:2) format supported throughout the pipeline _o Includes support for blending and multi-sample anti-aliasing . 2x/4x/6x Anti-Aliasing modes _o Multi-sample algorithm with gamma correction, programmable sparse sample patterns, and centroid sampling _o New Adaptive Anti-Aliasing feature with Performance and Quality modes _o Temporal Anti-Aliasing mode _o Lossless Color Compression (up to 6:1) at all resolutions, including widescreen HDTV resolutions . 2x/4x/8x/16x Anisotropic Filtering modes _o Up to 128-tap texture filtering _o Adaptive algorithm with Performance and Quality options . High resolution texture support (up to 4k x 4k)

Avivo Video and Display Engine . High performance programmable video processor _o Accelerated MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, WMV9, VC-1, and H.264 decoding (including DVD/HD-DVD/Blu-ray playback), encoding & transcoding _o DXVA support _o De-blocking and noise reduction filtering _o Motion compensation, IDCT, DCT and color space conversion _o Vector adaptive per-pixel de-interlacing _o 3:2 pulldown (frame rate conversion) . Seamless integration of pixel shaders with video in real time . HDR tone mapping acceleration _o Maps any input format to 10 bit per channel output . Flexible display support _o Dual integrated dual-link DVI transmitters _o DVI 1.0 / HDMI compliant and HDCP ready _o Dual integrated 10 bit per channel 400 MHz DACs _o 16 bit per channel floating point HDR and 10 bit per channel DVI output _o Programmable piecewise linear gamma correction, color correction, and color space conversion (10 bits per color) _o Complete, independent color controls and video overlays for each display _o High quality pre- and post-scaling engines, with underscan support for all outputs _o Content-adaptive de-flicker filtering for interlaced displays _o XilleonTM TV encoder for high quality analog output _o YPrPb component output for direct drive of HDTV displays _o Spatial/temporal dithering enables 10-bit color quality on 8-bit and 6-bit displays _o Fast, glitch-free mode switching _o VGA mode support on all outputs . Compatible with ATI TV/Video encoder products, including Theater 550 High Performance Memory Controller . Fully associative texture, color, and Z/stencil cache designs . Hierarchical Z-buffer with Early Z test . Lossless Z Compression (up to 48:1) . Fast Z-Buffer Clear . Z/stencil cache optimized for real-time shadow rendering

The bundle that came with the EAX1600PRO looks quite a bit different that the traditional Asus bundle, and with good reason.  What good would an HMDI port be if there wasn't a way to connect a monitor to it?  At the very least, there was an HMDI to DVI converter, one S/PDIF cable, an internal audio connector, and the aforementioned half-bracket with screws.  A quick setup guide provides the basics for installation, but it is too generic to cover the newer technologies found on the EAX1600PRO.  Luckily, Asus has provided links on their website that specifically cover HDMI and S/PDIF connection instructions for those inclined to use them.