Long-time motherboard maker Asus branched out into graphics cards a few years ago. Its latest offering, the Asus AGP-V8200 64MB, is powered by nVidia's GeForce3 chip. Never one to just go along with crowd, Asus has released two versions of the board, one it calls Pure and the other Deluxe. The V8200 Deluxe, while sharing the top-drawer performance of other GeForce3 cards, raises the feature level of the Pure version (and the price by AU$55) by adding TV-out, video-in, video editing software, and a pair of 3D glasses.
Assisted by Nvidia's Lightspeed Memory Architecture and crossbar memory controllers, the GeForce3 is an easy winner in our benchmark tests when compared against a GeForce2 card. The controllers' ability to communicate with the GPU and among themselves hack away at the memory bottleneck that forms when transferring graphic data into the frame buffer.
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Typically, our 3D benchmark test from MadOnion.com, 3Dmark2001 Pro, indicates about a 60 percent performance improvement, on average, for a GeForce3 card versus one with a GeForce2 when tested across a variety of resolutions with a 32-bit colour palette. The drivers Asus supplied with the V8200 Deluxe, however, bumped that difference up by about another 4 percent to 7 percent, depending on the resolution, with the largest improvement at 1,600 by 1,200. Our testbed system was a Dell Dimension XPS B800r, with 128M RDRAM, and running Windows 98SE.
This difference became most pronounced under Quake III Arena when tested at 1,600 by 1,200; it peaked at about 10 percent above the other GeForce3 cards (from Elsa and VisionTek we've tested. This advantage may disappear with the next iteration of Nvidia drivers, though Asus claims that the drivers it submitted were specifically modified for the additional features (3D glasses and video-in) on the V8200 Deluxe.
Asus includes its SmartDoctor utility that has a graphics-overclocking tool called Tweak. We ran it and, as we've seen in the past when we manually tweaked the engine and memory core settings of earlier Nvidia GPUs, the system locked up. Our one successful attempt netted us a performance increase of just one tenth of one percent. Harsh reality: The GeForce 3 is already at the leading edge. Anything more is over the edge, crashing on the floor.
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