Manufacturing giant ASUS today announced their own physics accelerator card based on the AGEIA PhysX processor. This brings the number of board partners to two, with BFG Technologies already shipping inside selected systems from Alienware, Dell and others, as we reported last week.

The big news is that while the BFG card has 128MB of on-board memory, the ASUS card announced recently sports 256MB. It is interesting to note the differences between the two boards: the ASUS is definitely not the same layout as the BFG, not just with higher capacity memory chips. But the heatsinks, ASUS has employed a larger, focused-flow design similar to that used on graphics cards. BFG has a cheaper, radial-finned design - clearly enough to cope with the 30-odd watts the PPU kicks out. There is also a different number of capacitors, in slightly different locations, on the PCBs.



ASUS PPU 256MB


BFG PPU 128MB