A month ago when all the leading graphics card manufacturers announced their products based on the new GeForce4 chip, we admired V8460Ultra, a GeForce4 based card from ASUS. The matter is that according to the official press-release, this graphics card worked at higher frequencies than NVIDIA recommended. Thus, V8460Ultra was to become one of the fastest GeForce4 based cards. That’s what the press-release of February 6 wrote:

ASUS V8460Ultra series is powered by the most advanced graphics processing unit on earth – the GeForce4 Ti 4600. A core clock speed of 330MHz and memory clock speed of 660MHz, combined with 128MB DDR SDRAM provide the ultimate graphics experience with revolutionary technologies such as: nFiniteFX II engine for complex geometry and animation, Accuview Antialiasing for unbeatable visual quality and frame rate, as well as nView for multiple display flexibility and user control.

As we can see, this press-release stated that the core and memory frequencies of V8460Ultra would make 330/660MHz, while NVIDIA-recommended frequencies were 300/650MHz. The announcement of V8460Ultra was accompanied with a document sent to ASUS partners, also saying about the increased frequencies of this card.

But when ASUS started sampling V8460Ultra, it came out that they worked at nominal 300/650MHz (for details you may look through a review at Tomshardware web-site). Worse still, their overclockability turned out very poor. They even failed to reach the promised 330/660MHz. What happened? Was it for the samples that were far from the ultimate version and therefore worked at lower frequencies? Well, as we found out, this assumption is false. If we cast another glance at the press-release at ASUS web-site, we’ll read the following:

ASUS V8460Ultra series is powered by the most advanced graphics processing unit on earth - the GeForce4 Ti 4600. A core clock speed of 300MHz and memory clock speed of 650MHz, combined with 128MB DDR SDRAM provide the ultimate graphics experience with revolutionary technologies such as: nFiniteFX II engine for complex geometry and animation, Accuview Antialiasing for unbeatable visual quality and frame rate, as well as nView for multiple display flexibility and user control.

This implies that ASUS is not going to launch the faster GeForce4 Ti4600. Moreover, the company didn’t care to tell anyone that it had changed the values in its own press-release. As a result, V8460Ultra cards will be just an ordinary GeForce4 Ti4600 based product advertised with dishonest methods. At first, the cards were advertised to have better characteristics, but the ultimately selling products won’t have any advantageous features. It’s no good, you know. Especially for such big company as ASUS. Now let’s wait for what the officials will say...