Introduction

NVIDIA Christmas

Almost every 3D junkie looking for the latest and greatest is drooling over the GeForce. Just about every hardware site out there is overflowing with GeForce reviews. With only one card, the Viper II, S3's Savage 2000 doesn't have the constant exposure five, six, or seven different cards bring to the GeForce. ATI is in the same situation with the Rage Fury MAXX, and it doesn't help when the GeForce outperforms both the MAXX and Viper II in the majority of the benchmarks.

Matrox and 3dfx are riding through the holidays without introducing any new technology. It looks like Nvidia's blue and green are going to dominate the holidays this year.

A few weeks ago we reviewed the ASUS AGP-V6600 Deluxe, and the consumer response for the card has been phenomenal. The feature-rich V6600 Deluxe stands head and shoulders above the rest of the GeForce cards available on the market.

There's a DDR version too!

Like other GeForce video card manufacturers, ASUS is ready to ship its DDR GeForce card, the AGP-V6800. As with the AGP-V6600, ASUS is offering the card in both Pure and Deluxe versions. What's the difference between Pure and Deluxe? Well, the Pure version is just a basic GeForce card with a single monitor output connector. The Deluxe version comes with an S-Video input, an S-Video output, a composite output and a VR output (for 3D glasses).

According to ASUS, the AGP-V6800 Pure is scheduled for a mid-December release, and the Deluxe version should be available in early January 2000. We managed to get our hands on an ASUS AGP-V6800 Pure card for review.

We take a look at the card, and see how it performs in our benchmark tests. We also try our hand at overclocking. We've noticed that all the new GeForce cards we've tested lately have been great overclockers, and we were curious to find out how well the ASUS AGP-V6800 would overclock.