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ASUS AGP V-6600 Deluxe
You can see on the cards layout that the V6600 Deluxe (not the pure model) offers a lot more than other GeForce cards. Three large condensators take care of a good power handling on the card. A Chrontel 7005C-T and Phillips chip take care for S-Video Out and IN. In the upper right corner are the chips that are needed for the 3D Shutter VR-glasses handling. An universal AGP slot allows compatibility for 2X and 4X mainboards. 32MB memory are splittet to 8 x 5,5ns SGRAM modules made by ESMT. The pre-series card is well manufactured. A very special component can be found on the left side above the chip. A Winbond W83781D chip is responsible for real hardware monitoring comtrol. It controlls chip temperature, voltage and fan rpm. The values can be controlled in Windows9x by the SmartDoctor software.
Software ASUS includes a very large software bundle with the card.
ASUS live! is responsible for video viewing and capturing in MPEG2 or other formats. It
can also capture single frames. Ulead Video Studio 4.0 (I think the first cards come with
3.0) can be used to easily cut own entry level video clips. The card offers no hardware
compression or Studio-optimized Video-Out so you shouldīnt expect professional
performance and quality. But itīs ideal to easily make your own private clips. ASUS delivers its own driver tweak menus. They look totaly different than the standard NVIDIA menus. You can set the refresh rate in a still very awkward process because there is no 'this setting for all' option. So you have to set all rates for desktop in 8, 16 and 32bit - and the same for Direct3D/Games. But you donīt have to test it anymore like with older driver versions. The settings for the ASUS 3D shutter glasses have their own menu. ASUS offers both page- and lineflipping. The first offers best quality but is a bit slower. Lineflipping is an interlace mode with loss of image resolution but very fast. The glasses work in D3D and with the latest beta drivers also in OpenGL. A tweak can change the clockrates of the card. You get dynamic overclocking when itīs used parallel with ASUS SmartDoctor hardware control software. This works this way: You set highest values in ASUS tweak and strart ASUS SmartDoctor by manual. Now the chip gets clocked down when it gets too hot. I think it would have been better if ASUS would make a 'all in one' tool because you have to install ASUS SmartDoctor seperate and some may not know that such a software exists. SmartDoctor also offers an idle mode for the GeForce chip. It clocks it down in idle phases, like surfing or writing letters. But lifetime should be no problems in the todayīs 6-12 months lifetime of graphic cards. Thereīs also a software called VideoSecurity. It can be used together with a video control camera. It sounds alert when it detects changes in the image - a very special application so I didīnt really test it. Drivers
I used the ASUS V6600 RC1 drivers for this
review. These drivers are based on the NVIDIA reference drivers v3.48 which are a bit
instable compared to the newer v3.53 based drivers. Small performance differences compared
to other cards are caused by the older driver status. But this will be fixed easily in a
few days when a newer driver version is released. ASUS will still improve the card in future. There will be OpenGL support for the 3D shutter glasses, a stereo video viewer software and dual-view TV-Out. Letīs wait and see. The features are allready very impressing today. Addditional information on RIVA Station about V6600: Versions: V6600 - 32MB SDRAM (Refrence design, no SmartDoctor) Planned: DDR versions (V6800 with 32MB und 64MB) |
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| Copyright: RIVA Station 1999 - Lars Weinand URL of this Article: www.rivastation.com/geforces_e.htm - If you want to link to it, please use this URL! :-) |
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