ASUS PhysX P1
There are currently only two companies producing retail parts for AGEIA’s PhysX PPU: ASUS and BFG. Today we will be looking at the ASUS PhysX P1 Physics Card. A quick glance over at our forums will make it quite clear that products from ASUS are quite popular among the gaming community. Their motherboards, which are known for their quality, stability, and above-average overclocking ability are well-regarded amongst gamers who prefer to build their own PCs. Let’s take a look at the specs of the ASUS PhysX P1 physics card.


In the graphics card world, a company called NVIDIA lets OEM partners stray from the reference design of its graphics boards. For instance if you look up the NVIDIA GeForce 7900GT graphics card on Newegg, you will see different-looking graphics cards, with varying specifications. This is done by the OEM manufacturers because they want consumers to buy their version of the card, for obvious reasons. AGEIA on the other hand has apparently not allowed ASUS and BFG to alter the operating frequencies of the parts on the graphics board. This could be for a lot of different reasons, including an optimized clock ratio, power consumption, and heat concerns. That is all speculation though, and as ATI has learned, it is not necessarily a good or bad decision in the first place. Nevertheless this results in PhysX cards with identical specs from both ASUS and BFG. The only distinguishable difference between the cards is the cooler designs and the software packages.

Before getting started with the tests, we thought we would address some of the specs that you might have questions about. One of the things that stands out to us when we look at these specs is that the processor frequency is not revealed. This could be the case for several reasons, none of which we have any idea about. However, if the processing world has taught us anything in recent years, it is that clock speeds really don’t count for much. We can look at the CPU scene and see a 2.8GHz Athlon64 FX-62 beating out a 3.46GHz Intel Pentium 4 EE, and then turn right around and see a 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 beating out that same FX-62. Similarly in the graphics scene, certain cores at low clock speeds beat out their higher-clocked competition. So when it really comes down to it, not knowing the core clock speed of AGEIA’s PhysX PPU is not very important.

Moving on, the next listed specification that stands out is that the PhysX PPU utilizes the PCI bus. This came as a surprise to us on our first look; why would a company debut this new device on the oldest of the currently used add-in card interfaces? However, the reason they probably did this becomes clear when you realize that out of every computer currently out there, a good 95%+ of them have PCI slots. This maximizes the potential consumer base for AGEIA. There is no means of testing the effectiveness of this card on the PCI interface compared with the PCI-Express interface, but we wouldn’t anticipate any tangible differences.

The final thing on the list that catches our eye is the value of 28W for peak power consumption. This number is pretty low for a chip like this and as a result, we wouldn’t expect the heat output of the card to be very high at all. However, it is still high enough that it will need to make use of a supplementary power cable, because the PCI bus can supply a maximum of 15W. For comparison purposes, ATI’s Radeon X1900 XTX under heavy 3D load can consume as much as 120W.