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The
ATI Rage Fury MAXX
ATI's
New Twin Engine Hot Rod
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| Installation,
Setup and DVD with the
Rage Fury MAXX |
| Solid
and stable |
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| ATI
has always excelled with respect to driver
functionality. They produce a very full
featured driver suite for this card and
compatibility and stability are excellent.
Their OpenGL ICD and D3D drivers are still a
little "green" but more on that
later. Here are screen shots of a couple
of the properties tabs.
As
you can see here, the MAXX drivers are feature
rich and give the user a fair amount of tweaking
options with OpenGL, Direct 3D and Gamma/Color
settings. You can also disable dual-chip
mode if you like. This turns off one of
the Rage Fury Pro GL chips in full screen 3D
applications as well.
Setup
Note:
One
area that we had a little problem with the Rage
Fury MAXX was when we installed the card on our
Intel BX chipset based test bed, the Abit
BE6. Since the BX chipset doesn't
officially support a Front Side Bus speed of
over 100MHz. the clock frequency that is derived
for the AGP bus is typically set to either 2/3
of the FSB or full FSB speed. This
overclocks the AGP bus to 88MHz when using a
processor that needs a 133MHz. FSB. The
MAXX would lock up while in 3D mode when we
tried to run it with this set up.
We
then installed the Rage Fury MAXX into our VIA
Apollo Pro PC133 test bed, the Tyan Trinity 400
Motherboard. In this situation, the MAXX
ran without a hiccup since the VIA chipset
supports 133MHz. Front Side Bus speeds while
keeping the AGP clock to the proper constant
66MHz. AGP specified speed.
You should keep this in mind if you are running
an overclocked system.
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DVD:
One
area that this board absolutely shines in is DVD
Output. The Rage Fury MAXX has THE best
DVD output I have seen to date, hands
down. The MAXX has built in hardware
supported motion compensation and "IDCT"
(Inverse Discrete Cosine Tranform) for DVD
playback, as does any ATI board based on the
Rage Fury GL chip set.
Going
back to my ST
Microelectronics days reminds me that DCT is
one of the steps of JPEG and MPEG compression
and encoding. Take the "inverse' of
DCT or IDCT and you have decompression and
decoding. Supporting this feature in hardware
alleviates this burden from the host processor
in the system.
The
frame rate is fantastic with not even so much as
a single dropped frame or misstep. The
image quality is superb and the DVD player that
ATI bundles with the board is very easy to use
and flawless. Here is a screenshot of the
player.
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Unfortunately
I couldn't get Hypersnap to capture the DVD
Video Overlay in this shot. However, I
can't say enough about how impressed I was with
the quality of DVD output with the Rage Fury
MAXX. Seeing this in action may alone
compel many of you DVD buffs to go with the
Rage Fury MAXX. The board is that
impressive with respect to DVD support.
There is no TV Output on this board however, so
you will have to just purchase that new 21"
monitor you have been drooling over.
That's reasonable justification isn't it?
:)
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| Overclocking
The Rage Fury MAXX |
| Guard
band to spare. |
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Out
of the box, the Rage Fury MAXX comes set to
143MHz. memory speed and 125 MHz. core processor
speed. We were able to overclock the board
to 150MHz. Core and 175MHz. memory clocks
respectively. This was a nice boost in
performance over the default core and it was
accomplished using only the stock active heat
sinks that were supplied on the
board.
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3D
Image Quality and Benchmarks, click
next.
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