ASUS AGP-V3200 Banshee

The AGP-V3200 Banshee is available in two versions: 8MB SGRAM (AGP) und 16MB SGRAM (AGP). There is no PCI board available. I used the 16MB version for the testings (8x2MB SGRAM chips from EliteMt, 8ns). Powerstrip reports clockrates of 100,2 MHz coreclock and 100,2 MHz memclock.

ASUS uses a heatsink/fan combination for cooling (In contrast to product photos on the ASUS webpage). This seems to be needed: The back of the card right behind the chip gets very warm! It subjective hotter than the V3400 TNT. The heatsink is hold on the chip by a spring/bolt combination an itīs no problem to remove it. The V3400 uses the same system.

The Board-layout of the V3200 Banshee is rev. 1.00. There are two connectors for add-on cards in the upper part of the board. The handbook speaks of TV tuners, MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and video capture add-ons. But there is no such hardware available yet.

The board is well manufactured and I see no reason for critics on the board layout. Itīs worth to mention that the power cable of the fan is connected through a standard jumper bridge on the card. You can remove the cable very easy. So you wonīt have any problems to remove/replace the fan.

The drivers

The current ASUS drivers v1.02 were used for this test. They support the 3D APIīs Direct3D and Glide. You can find a beta version of a OpenGL driver on the ASUS CD. But the installation software does only search for the games Quake, Quake2 and Hexen II. It puts a 700KB sized file called Opengl32.dll in the game directorys it finds. But this driver does not have a good performance at all. You should use the much smaller 3Dfx Miniport drivers (v1.46 Beta) to get best performance of the Banshee in Quake2&Co. This package does include the necessary files for Quake, Quake2, Hexen II, SIN, Halflife und Heretic II.
A full OpenGL ICD driver is not available yet. Thereīs only a beta version available from 3Df thatīs dated June 98. But not all OpenGL features are included in that driver (Fog for example).

The Direct 3D and Glide drivers work without problems. The installation is done by a setup software (You can remove them using Windows system/software/deinstall). As on the V3400 CD there is a menu that gives you an overview of the software you can find on the CD.
The installation software checks your mainboard and asks if it should install the VGARTD AGP drivers for your mainboard. You should be carefull here (SS7 users!), because there might be more actual drivers available in the web.
The CD that was incuded in the package does not contain the actual drivers (v1.0) and I missed the very comfortable installation/explanation menus of the V3400 TNT CD.

After the installation you can find some tweak menus for Direct3D and Glide in your display/properties menu.
Very positive are the Windows-resolutions that are supported by the card. For example the 720x576 PAL-TV resolution.
A fullversion of the game Incoming is also included in the package.

Supported Resolutions:

Available modells

ASUS AGP-V3200 Banshee 8MB SGRAM
ASUS AGP-V3200 Banshee 16MB SGRAM

Software included:
- VCD Power MPEG Video Player
- ASUS Live3400 (Nur TV Version)
- Rageīs INCOMING (Full)

Warranty: 3 years