X-bit labs

ASUS V9950 Graphics Card Review (page 3)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin

[ 07/22/2003 | 03:17 AM ]

Product Bundle

As for the items shipping together with the graphics card, the list is impressively rich. The manufacturer proved highly generous and included 6 CD-disks with various games and software into the package. Besides, when we opened the box we found an irreplaceable TV-cable with and RCA and S-Video connectors. Here is the detailed list of items bundled with the ASUS V9950 graphics card:

• S-Video-to-RCA cable;
• User’s guide in English;
• Multi-lingual drivers installation guide;
• ASUS CD-disk with drivers and utilities;
• CD-disk with ASUSDVD XP utility;
• Gunmetal game;
• Delta Force: Black Hawk Down game;
• Battle Engine game;
• Games Power disk with demo versions of various games.

 The last disk contai9n demo versions of such games as WarcrAnisotropic Filteringt III, Splinter Cell, Big Mutha Truckers, BREED, Colin McRae Rally 3 and TOCA Race Driver. Well, the happy owner of this graphics accelerator, won’t ever be bored, that’s for sure. Let’s take a closer look at the CD-disk with utilities. Our experience suggests that there might be something really “yummy” over there. And our expectations proved absolutely justified: besides the standard drivers set we found ASUS SmartDoctor, ASUS Digital VCR, ASUS GameFace and ASUS Video Security utilities. I would like to dwell on each of these programs a little bit more now.

ASUS SmartDoctor: Monitoring, Which Is Not There

This utility is intended for monitoring of such graphics card status parameters as temperature and fan rotation speed. We have already seen soothing like that by TYAN TGM. However, since ASUS V9950 is not equipped with any hardware monitoring systems, ASUS SmartDoctor grew into a common overclocking utility with very limited opportunities. The maximum frequencies you can set with the help of this program make 420Mhz for the chip and 890MHz for the memory, although the potential of this graphics solution is much bigger and it can work fine at 480MHz chip and 915MHz memory, which can be set using NVIDIA CoolBits.