ASUS announced the launching of a new graphics card called ASUS V6600MX. Despite "MX" letters present in the card’s name, it is based on NVIDIA GeForce256 and equipped with 32MB memory.
The recommended cost of this product is $75.
However, as far as we know ASUS has been manufacturing GeForce256 based V6600 cards for a long time already. Take for instance, ASUS AGP-V6600 Pure. These cards have been selling at a price exceeding $75 for a while now. So, why on earth did they need one more graphics card then? What’s the secret?
If you take a look at the picture of ASUS V6600MX (see high-quality picture here), then you will see that the new card is equipped with SDR SDRAM, while its predecessor, ASUS V6600 Pure, had SDR SGRAM onboard. Moreover, the new board features free spot for another 32MB of memory and is designed with AGP Pro interface.
Also ASUS has long ago announced another GeForce256 based graphics card with 64MB SDRAM and AGP Pro interface.
If we compare the looks of V6600MX and V6600 64MB, we will be able to notice that the new card is just the same as the old 64MB one but with only 32MB of memory. So everything seems to be getting clear now: ASUS announced the launching of a new V6600 64MB graphics card based on the first GeForce256, however the cards didn’t sell well because the extra 32MB of memory added only to the cost of the product, and not to its performance. Moreover, the sales of ASUS V6600 64MB were undermined by the launching of the cards based on the second GeForce2. As a result, ASUS appeared a happy owner of a certain amount of ready 64MB PCBs, memory chips and GeForce256 chipsets. Since the 64MB card version didn’t sell well, ASUS decided to get rid of the old components, which remained in stock. The company engineers suggested equipping these PCBs with only 32MB memory and selling these cards at extremely low prices in order to stimulate the demand.
If we disregard the origin of our today’s newcomer, then V6600MX will look like a really smart graphics card. The performance of GeForce256 in applications, which do not use hardware T&L (and they are the majority today), is very close to that of GeForce2 MX, though V6600MX can boast much lower price than any other GeForce2 MX based card selling now. However, we really doubt that this graphics card will be selling for a long time. ASUS is very unlikely to have a lot of PCBs, especially since NVIDIA GeForce256 chips aren’t manufactured any longer.