The Inquirer managed to get hold of the official press-release from ASUS with the announcements of the new graphics cards based on GeForce4 and GeForce4 MX chips, which should be announced on February 6.

According to this document, ASUS will launch 5 new graphics cards:

• ASUS V8460Ultra. The graphics cards is based on the fastest GeForce4 Ti 4600 chip working at 330MHz core frequency and will be equipped with 128MB DDR SDRAM working at 660MHz.
• ASUS V8400. This card will be based on GeForce4 Ti 440 with 300Mhz core frequency. It will have 128MB DDR graphics memory working at 550MHz.
• ASUS V8170Pro. This graphics card will be built on GeForce4 MX Pro (GeForce4 MX460). The core will work at 300Mhz and the memory at 550MHz. The card will be equipped with 64MB DDR SDRAM.
• ASUS V8170DDR. This solution will be based on 270MHz GeForce4 MX440 (GeForce4 MX DDR) and will go with 64MB DDR SDRAM working at 400MHz.
• ASUS V8170SE. This graphics card is based on GeForce4 MX420 chip working at 270MHz. It will have 64MB DDR SDRAM working at 166MHz.

According to the press-release, the entire family of new graphics cards will start shipping in February. In other words, we will be able to see the cards on GeForce4 and GeForce4 MX almost at once after the chips official launching.

In the meanwhile I would like to point out that four new graphics cards from ASUS out of 5 have standard features meeting NVIDIA’s recommendations completely as far as the working frequencies, the memory type and size go. However, one graphics card, namely, ASUS V8400Ultra, the fastest of all, boasts better looking specs than those proposed by NVIDIA. instead of 300MHz core and 650MHz memory frequency, which will be typical of most GeForce4 Ti 4600 based cards, ASUS’ solution will be overclocked up to 330MHz core 660MHz memory. Probably, since ASUS is now NVIDIA’s No.1 partner, they got the opportunity to buy specially selected chips and veer a bit away from the reference specs.

However, I would like to stress that ASUS will definitely face some serious problems when pushing its new graphics cards into the market. The matter is that the previous graphics cards family from ASUS based on GeForce3 chips was called V8200. The new cards built on the newer GeForce4 chips feature close numeric marking, although they are based on the next generation chip. This will definitely mislead and confuse the customers, though ASUS is actually right in a way: GeForce4 is not so very different from GeForce3.