Asus V8200T2 and V8200T5 Titanium GeForce3's


Asus V8200T2 and V8200T5 Titanium GeForce3s! - Page 2

Asus V8200T5 Deluxe and V8200T2 Deluxe
GeForce3 Titanium Series
Hot Hardware - nVidia Titanium - Light and Strong

By Dave Altavilla
12/3/01

 
Of all the graphics card OEMs in the market, Asus is one of the best at "making it their own". 

Software, Drivers and Setup
All sorts of goodies bundled in
 

That is to say, with an Asus GeForce3 card, you don't just get the standard reference designed board and a driver CD.  The models we tested were "Deluxe" versions versus the more basic "Pure" models that Asus offers.  Not only are they nicely customized on the hardware side of things, Asus packs in a lot of extras with their software bundle and with the Deluxe models, 3D Stereoscopic Shutter Glasses.

We tested the performance of the VR100G glasses and we were fairly impressed with the quality.  However, this feature is more of a novelty for us here at HotHardware. Often, we find this type of technology more head-ache inducing than anything else.  Comparatively, these glasses were of higher quality than most that we have seen, they just weren't our cup of tea however.  On the other hand, the TV In option of this card is right up our alley and we did test that capability with the addition of the Asus TV-Box

The Asus TVBox utilizes nVidia Personal Cinema technology to bring TV to the desktop.  The product is sold seperately but for fairly short money, it incorporates a TV Tuner and does provide some basic capture functionality as well.  This unit came with a remote sensor as well for remote control of TV Channel switching and recording.  However, for some reason we couldn't get the remote to work at all.  We're fairly sure we just got a bad unit and have requested a replacement from Asus.

 

That didn't stop us from surfing the TV stations with ease however and Asus' included "Digital VCR" software is all you need to kill loads of time in front of the tube.  Here is a quick snapshot of the interface. Click image for full viewing.

Much like the Intervideo WinDVD Software, that was included with the Visiontek XTasy Everything Personal Cinema pack that we reviewed not long ago, Asus Digital VCR software provides TV Tuner and Capture functions with a simple and slick user interface.  It seemed as though it wasn't quite as convenient or powerful as the Visiontek Personal Cinema XTasy Everything offering.  On the other hand, this desktop TV function is available to all Asus "Deluxe" models and allowed us to watch TV on an Asus GeForce3 Ti500 based product, whereas the Visiontek product is only available with a GeForce2MX 400 at this point in time. On that note, we'll chalk a big point up for Asus here.

Asus bundles their own "wrapped" version of the nVidia Detonator 4 Drivers.  They do provide some addition functionality, especially for the 3D VR100 Glasses.  Here are a few captures to show you what the drivers are all about.

Hardware Info Tab

Driver Info Tab

Asus Tweak Tab

VR-Glasses Tab

As you can see, the Asus drivers that are currently available as well on the Asus web site, are based on the nVidia 21.81 drivers.  Since these are behind a few revisions, we decided to test with the more recent 21.85 drivers that nVidia sent us. Also please note, at the time of testing, nVidia 23.10 drivers were not available.

Asus also includes the handy "Smart Doctor" utility for monitoring the health of your graphics card.  This is a feature that few manufacturers provide.

You may have noticed that we deliberately unplugged our cooling fan on the card, to see if the software would catch a failure like this.  It certainly did catch and warn us of the malfunction.  Again, Asus scores another point with us for innovation.

Finally just for the fun factor, here are a few 4X AA screenshots of Id's Return To Castle Wolfenstein!


 


 

You simply can't beat an great AA and high resolution textures.  We even dialed up the Anisotropic Filtering, so those textures are that much more sharp and detailed.

Time for the benchmarks folks!

3DMark, Max Payne and Overclocking

 

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