AGP-V3400 TNT / TV

I got the 16MB Retail AGP-card (Rev 1.01) directly from ASUS Ratingen. As the Viper V550 it uses SDRAM (MIRA - 8ns).
For cooling the card has a flat fan combined with a heatsink. The fan gets its power from the card itself. The upper part of the card features two VIP-Ports (14-/7-pairs). ASUS will offer add-on boards (DVD/MPEG) for them in future. Unfortunately I have no details about these up to now.
You can change the Video norm between NTSC and PAL with a jumper. Video sources can be connected via composite (cinch) and S-VHS. The adapters are right and left of the VGA-connector. A Chrontel 7003 PC to TV Encoder is responsible for Video-OUT. I will later talk about the Video I/O functions later in the test. You also get two 1,5m long video-connector cables, 1x composite, 1x S-VHS. The card is manufactured in high quality. Only the power cable to the fan could have been fixed a bit better (changed in a later board revision). The BIOS version of the tested card is 2.04.14. According to Powerstrip the card has a Chipclock of 90Mhz and the memory has 110Mhz Memclock. That is exactly the specification of nVIDIA, the same that Erazor II and V550.

ASUS AGP V3400 TNT/TV (click to enlarge)

Installation

The drivers and utility installtion is truly excellent. After inserting the CD an installion program starts that guides through the rest of the installation. The drivers can be installed by the program or "manually" through Win9x. ASUS does also give you Mainboard drivers that are important for  WIN95. Drivers for the new SS7 chipset mainboards are also included as intel LX and BX drivers.

Very nice is the "Layout View" the installtion routine offers. All important parts of the card are explained. Support Information like phone numbers, mail, ftp for new drivers e.g. can be found here.

Screenshots Installationsoftware (click to enlarge)

Drivers

Drivers: The drivers of version 1.01 are based on the newest nVIDIA 0.41-Reference drivers. The drivers offer many settings that are explained in the manual. The refresh rate can be chosen in 1Hz steps. Screen position and size can be adjusted by the driver. Gamma-correction and sliders for contrast and brightness are there, too. There´s also a folder for system informations. But the driver version is not shown on this page unfortunately.
You cannot completly disable Anti-Aliasing in the drivers menu. To compare the ASUS board with Erazor II and Viper V550 I had to disable this function in the registry "by hand". Another possibilty is to install the nVIDIA Rerence drivers. Its tweak panel is still active after the reinstalltion of the ASUS drivers. (The ASUS drivers use the same folder in the registry)

Screenshots driversettings (click to enlarge)

Results

The ASUS drivers are fast and stable. I had no image faults in my tests. According to ASUS, the standard settings for this card is maximum image quality. That is a brave decision, because the board will not reach maximum performance with these settings. But except Antialiasing you can change this with a few mouse clicks. After doing that the the card reaches the same high marks as the Erazor II and the Viper V550. The differences in the benchmarks are marginal and in the 1-2 fps error tolerance area of the benchmarks. Only in the Trigger 3D test the Erazor II had really higher marks. But in the memory test of 3dMARK 99, that uses AGP function with loading 32MB of textures showed no marginal differences to the Erazor II.

Supported screen resolutions:

Models of the ASUS AGP-V3400 TNT:

8MB SGRAM Frame Buffer
- AGP-V3400TNT/8MB: Pure VGA
- AGP-V3400TNT/TV/8MB: VGA + Video-In + Video-Out

16MB SGRAM Frame Buffer
- AGP-V3400TNT/16MB: Pure VGA
- AGP-V3400TNT/TV/16MB: VGA + Video-In + Video-Out

Bundeled software:
- VCD Power MPEG Video Player
- ASUS Live3400 (Only TV Version)
- Rage´s INCOMING

Waranty 3 years (In Germany)