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We were lucky enough to get our hands on a pre-release version of the new ASUS AGP-V6600 Deluxe, ASUS's latest GeForce offering. Our card was supplied by EYO Technologies in Sydney, who received it directly from ASUS in Taiwan. Note that this is a pre-release only, and therefore we don't have the final retail packaging to show you, nor do we have any details of the games bundle etc.

Here's what we were supplied:

As you can see, there's the ASUS AGP-V6600 Deluxe board, Stereoscopic 3D VR glasses, and assorted cables. Also supplied but not shown were a preview copy of the manual and a pre-release cd-rom containing the drivers and assorted utilities.

Taking a look at the card itself, you can see that the V6600 Deluxe board has all the I/O functionality you could possibly wish for.

Connectors on the rear of the card include : VR-OUT (for the 3D Glasses), S-Video In, VGA Out, S-Video Out, and Composite Out. The supplied cables included a composite video cable, an S-Video cable, and an S-Video to Composite adapter cable. Phew - this baby looks as if it will do everything but make the coffee!

The Ram used on the board is Samsung 5ns SGRAM. This compares favorably with the 5.5ns SDRAM that is used on the V6600 'Pure', and should be stable at speeds up to 200Mhz and possibly a little beyond.

The V6600 Deluxe makes use of a Phillips Video Decoder chip, and a Chrontel Video Encoder chip to handle the video in/out capabilities, both should produce fairly decent results.

I also noticed that the Heatsink and fan on the V6600 Deluxe board is of different construction to that on the V6600 'Pure' version - the heatsink is a little larger, and is of a radial design, and the fan is an integrated 3-wire design that supports fan speed monitoring! Is this a first for a video card?

Taking a look at the manual in regard to this reveals some very interesting new hardware features, all centering around ASUS's new SmartDoctor Technology.

According to a recent press release, SmartDoctor will monitor the rotational speed of the fan, will monitor AGP power levels, will provide Overheat Protection for the GeForce GPU, and introduces SmartCooling Technology. Also introduced is Dynamic Overclocking Technology. Taking a closer look at the board, I noticed that ASUS use a Winbond Hardware Monitor IC to achieve this.

In the above photo, you can also see the 3-wire header for the fan. Neat. I delved a little deeper to come up with the following descriptions for this new SmartDoctor Technology.

• Fan RPM Monitoring - The bundled utility reports the exact fan rotation speed, so that any malfunction can be reported before it causes a problem
• AGP Power Level Monitoring - As the GeForce 256 requires so much power from the AGP bus, there must be a stable supply to all critical components. ASUS's Smartdoctor technologies can monitor the power level supplied by the AGP bus, including VIO, and VCORE, to ensure stability of the system.
• OverHeat Protection - With Overheat Protection, the internal temperature of the GeForce 256 is monitored. If temperatures reach a dangerous level, Smartdoctors SmartCooling technologies kick in to throttle back the GPU, reducing temperature.
• SmartCooling Technology - The SmartCooling Technology automatically reduces the speed of the GeForce 256 GPU, when not required. For example, when typing a mail message, or word processing the GPU can be throttled back to reduce component temperatures, and increase longevity.
• Dynamic Overclocking Technology - Overclocking options are no longer static with Dynamic Overclocking Technology. This has been designed to prevent excessive overclocking that may shorten the GPU's life. Overclocking is essentially automated, the GPU is throttled up when high performance is required, and throttled back when not required. So no more fixed overclocking, which in ASUS's words is outmoded and risky.

It is interesting to note that the pre-release of the manual does not mention Dynamic Overclocking Technology, and in fact, ASUS have suppled a Tweak utility on the cd-rom. Hmmmm. Personally, I can't see much of a difference between the SmartCooling, the OverHeat Protection, and the Dynamic Overclocking Technology anyway - they all appear to operate in the same way. Essentially the idea is that when performance is required, SmartDoctor will throttle up the GPU and Memory, and will throttle back when either the performance is no longer required or one of the other monitoring technologies kicks in (such as the overheat protection). A good concept, so long as the system will allow the card to operate right on the edge of its performance envelope.

Apart from the additional video and monitoring hardware, the board layout is as you would expect, with the RAM distributed evenly on either side of the board, and the now standard AGP4x connector.