14 DAY TRIAL // Asustek Computer is a respected manufacturer of mainboards and video cards. At first, Asus's technicians preferred a more conservative, reference-like design when they were building a new motherboard or VGA adapter but it seems that the conservative part got lost somewhere along the way. Asus recently produced some crazy INTEL motherboards and I think that the virus has finally infected the VGA division too. Because they've recently announced that they will produce a dual GPU X1950 Pro card.
Asus' board probably uses dual print-circuit board design and by the looks of it somewhat resembles Nvidia's 7950 GX2 card. If we're to take the power specs of a single X1950 GPU, the dual card will probably suck more juice than an overclocked 8800 GTX but I really doubt that it will perform the same as Nvidia's DirectX 10 flagship. Another "not that good" thing is the fact that the board lacks Crossfire capabilities so a quad-Crossfire setup will only be possible if you use Sapphire's card.
The EAX1950 Pro Dual uses two RV570 GPUs at 581MHz and 256MB*2 of GDDR3 memory at 1404MHz. We don't know if the dual-GPU boards which use the PLX PEX8522 PCI Express bridge are compatible with mainboards that don't support Crossfire setups but I hope that it won't be a problem.
We've seen Sapphire's board at work and Asus says that they are planning to mass release their version as soon as possible. And while I hope that the boards will perform better than their single-GPU brothers, I really don't get why they feel the need to make dual GPU cards when DirectX 10 is almost here. A dual X1950 Pro card can't cost less than $450 (if you take the reference price for the single GPU version) and it simply won't deliver the same performance as a DirectX 10 solution in the same price range.