Forced to use GeForce.
Written: Jan 02 '02 (Updated Jan 03 '02)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Nice fast card, quick installation, cutting edge.
Cons: Why should you have to tweak a card that is supposed to already be fast?
The Bottom Line: For the price, buy the V8200 T2 Pure; it has all the performance you will currently need. Just be prepared for a little adjustment.
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| CaptHerp's Full Review: ASUS V8200 Pure, (64 MB) AGP Video Card |
As a former user of Voodoo cards, it was a bit annoying to me, after 3dfx talked me into buying two Voodoo5 5500 AGP cards for my wife's and my machines, that 3dfx went belly-up and sold out to Nvidia. While getting as much money as possible out of as many people as you can to stall off the pain of bankruptcy probably makes sense as far as a business decision goes, it didn't do customers any favors. Nvidia bought out everything, the hardware and the technology, and promptly buried anything to do with Voodoo, guaranteeing that sooner or later you would probably come to a card with an Nvidia chipset. With DirectX constantly evolving, and support for 3dfx cards suddenly obliterated, there aren't all that many chip manufacturers out there: ATI, Nvidia, and Guillemot(Hercules).
I knew, with games out there that would increasingly take advantage of DirectX8 and so on, I would eventually have to get rid of my Voodoo cards and bite the bullet. And so, after reading some writeups and checking out a few benchmarks, it looked as though the Asus V8200 T2 Pure would be the best deal for the money.
I have to admit, I miss the Voodoo. I think the 3dfx card graphics were sharper, but all in all I think that I didn't make too drastic a move to go to the GeForce3, but there was a bit of a learning curve:
My primary game, since I run an international Diablo 2 guild on Battle.net, is, obviously, Diablo 2. Upon getting the card loaded and starting into a game, I was horrified to find out that it ran like a slideshow, and questions to various computer nerd forum boards went unanswered. The card SHOULD be fast, and yet, it couldn't run a lousy 2D game like Diablo 2. I came close, after a couple of days, to reinstalling my Voodoo card, and then I tried running the card in Direct Draw, via a choice offered in the D2 video test. Voila! The game runs great, probably because the card doesn't have to continuously waste resources trying to turn a 2D game into a 3D game by using Direct 3D. This apparently is a good tip for future users of the card, since I had to figure this one out myself. The only problem (and this could be fixed in the near future) is that the game Serious Sam can't use the card at all, which possibly could mean that the card is just too new. I haven't gotten any answers on that one, but hopefully soon.
Now that I got that problem solved, and knowing that every benchmark centers on the framerates you achieve in Quake 3 Arena (did you ever wonder what would happen if we couldn't bring up something in a game that showed FPS? No one would know that their card was horrible, and everyone would probably still be raving about their Voodoo Banshees or Canopus Pure 3Ds), I decided to run it in a first person shooter game and analyze it a bit. Since I detest Quake, I tried Unreal Tournament, and throwing all the options I could at it as far as resolutions and high quality everything I could, my framerate runs at least a third higher than I got with the Voodoo. So it passes that test, but I still think, past a certain point where the human eye can't distinguish framerate anyway, that it gets a bit overrated.
The only other quibbles I have with the card are that it seems that overclockers and tweakers are encouraged, and necessary, to make the cards run the way the magazines say they should run. My question is: If the damned card is so fast, why should you have to tweak it at all? I won't overclock it, because I don't have room for a high speed monster fan in my computer box to cool it, and I remember all the kids who tweaked their cars when I was in high school: they went real fast for about three days, and then they were fixing the remains of some manufacturer-exceeded tweak explosion in their garage. Here's a REAL puzzle: The Asus driver disc includes an overclocking utility, but as soon as you move the little sliders to raise the values you get this big warning in red letters that overclocking your card and damaging it will void your warranty. And yet the manufacturer offers it anyway? Go figure. Additionally, I loaded the new Nvidia Detonator 23.11 drivers from nvidia.com, which were touted as an "instant upgrade" to your card, and installed them, and found another dilemma: While you have both the factory drivers from the install disc and the Detonator drivers on your machine, you either get one or the other. Installing the Detonator drivers made all the Asus icons, etc., disappear (except in my Add/Remove Programs list) and in the back of my mind it bugs me a little. The factory drivers must have some proprietary information for Asus cards in there that is being overridden by Nvidia drivers, or otherwise Asus would just have shipped an install disc with generic Nvidia drivers on it. Sigh.
In any case, the price tag on the Asus Deluxe cards (using the Ti2 and Ti5 chips) includes TV-out and the ability to use stereoscopic glasses. Now, I am somewhat of a computer gaming geek, granted, but sitting in front of a perfectly good monitor with some weird looking specs strapped to my face is something I have no use for; additionally, I have never seen the use for TV out. I can see it now: fathers who want to watch 60 Minutes suddenly find themselves watching their teenage son proudly fragging opponents. Tell me why we need this stuff, lol.
The performance of the Pure, without the TV out and the glasses capability, is exactly the same as the Deluxe for about $150.00 cheaper at current prices, and the Ti2 chip is close enough in performance to the grossly overpriced Ti5-based cards that there was no contest in buying it.
In short, I like the card, but I wish that there were some way to avoid three days of hassles tweaking settings to make it work the way the magazine reviewers tell you it should, and I wish that all cards using Nvidia chipsets would use standardized drivers. It would make life a lot easier. All in all though, for cutting edge graphics technology at a reasonable price, it seems tough to beat the V8200 T2 at this date, and, although graphics card manufacturing is a cutthroat business, both Asus and Nvidia show no signs of going anywhere, with Nvidia doing so well last year that they are in the Standard and Poors 500 companies on the stockmarket now. The one thing I can say about Asus' website, though, is that if you ever manage to get the site to work and get to the latest drivers section, I would definitely save the drivers to disc, because it might be two weeks before you can get the Asus site to come up again. They make good stuff, but their webmasters need a bit of work, apparently.
I would recommend this card to any avid gamer.
My system, while I think of it:
OS: Windows 98SE
Pentium 3 800
256 RDRAM
56x CD-ROM
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 214.00
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Epinions.com ID:
CaptHerp
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Location: Phoenix, AZ, USA
Reviews written: 13
Trusted by: 3 members
About Me:
College educated, well-read, animal-loving, computer-gaming naturalist. Yes, Republicans like clean air too.
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