Asus V7100 Deluxe Combo

Nvidia currently holds the crown for the fastest video cards with GeForce2 Ultra and the recently announced GeForce3 GPU (Graphics Processing Unit). Unfortunately, not many people can afford such cards in India as they are priced very high. It’s with this market segment in mind that Nvidia released the GeForce2 MX

GPU. The MX is a replacement for the economical but aging TNT2 family, and is establishing new performance standards at its price point. Here, we take a look at Asus V7100, which comes equipped with this

GPU.

About the MX chipset

Originally called NV11, the core of MX is the same as the GeForce2

GTS, with some modifications in architecture. The biggest change has been the reduction in the number of rendering pipelines from four in the GTS as well as GeForce256, to two in the

MX. Though this might suggest that MX will have half the fill rate, it’s important to remember that one of the main upgrades made to the GeForce core when moving to GeForce2 GTS was the doubling of texture processing capability to two textures per pipeline per clock pulse. Hence, the MX actually ends up rendering the same number of textures as the original GeForce256 per clock cycle. However, the clock speed of the core has been decreased to 175 MHz from 200 MHz in the

GTS. One result of this lowering of clock speed is that the chip runs much cooler compared to the rest, and can run well without any heat sink or fan on it. Unlike some of the other cards based on the MX

GPU, like the VisionTek GeForce2 MX, Asus has included a heat sink on the V7100, which will be useful for those who like to overclock their video cards. The last difference is that the MX ships only with SDR (Single Data Rate) memory, unlike the GeForce256, and

GTS, which halves the memory bandwidth available compared to the DDR (Double Data Rate) counterparts.

The card’s features

The V7100 ships with 32 MB of onboard video memory. It has an integrated transform and lighting engine. Asus has also added a feature called

TwinView. Similar to the DualHead technology implemented in many of Matrox’s cards, it gives this card the ability to drive two displays at the same time. This could be two monitors, TVs, digital flat panels, or a combination of these. However, to use two monitors, the card requires an external RAMDAC to be connected to it, which is not the case with Matrox cards. Unfortunately, we didn’t have this, so we were unable to check out the card’s TwinView feature. Also, the card comes with a built-in TV tuner, enabling you to watch TV on your PC. The only feature that we missed was the presence of a remote control unit.

Performance

In all fairness, we should admit that we were not expecting this card to perform as well as it did considering its price. We ran it through the usual slew of benchmarks–Quake III Arena, 3DMark99 Max and 3DWinbench 2000. Compared to a RIVA TNT2 based card with similar features, this one is a far better in performance, as can be seen from the results.

The card ships with six CDs that include its drivers, DVD playback software, TV tuning, and Soldier of Fortune, a 3D game. Overall, if you are one of those looking for a new video card to power the latest games and don’t have the money to go in for a GeForce2

GTS, try the Asus V7100. The card is available in many versions, and the simplest 32 MB one without any frills costs about Rs 9,500. 

Anuj Jain at PCQ Labs