First Impressions and Overclocking

Take a look

AGP-V6600 Deluxe

Rear View

The card faceplate is completely filled with the VR output, S-Video input, monitor output, S-Video output, and TV composite output. Note that the Pure version will only have the monitor output. The fan on our ASUS card is larger than the ones on our NVIDIA reference GeForce boards. The fan blades are larger, and are angled steeper in order to move more air.

The memory

Our ASUS evaluation board uses Samsung 5ns KM4132G112-5 SGRAM. The memory is rated up to 200MHz, which is well above the 166MHz default GeForce specs.

Overclocking

What? Dynamic overclocking didn't turn out to be as exciting as it sounds? How about some real overclocking? No video card utility package is complete without some sort of tweaking utility. Even though ASUS is aiming for stability above all else, the company isn't ignoring the overclockers out there. The AGP-V6600 installation CD comes with the ASUS Tweak Utility. The utility allows you to adjust the engine and memory clock speed of your V6600 card.

Tweak Utility

After running the program, we encounter the familiar double slider setup, one for the engine clock and the other for the memory speed. You can adjust the engine core speed anywhere from the 120MHz default setting all the way up to 142MHz. The memory slider goes from the 166MHz default up to 195MHz.

We were able to clock the card all the way up to the maximum 142/195 setting without a problem. It's unfortunate that the ASUS Tweak Utility only goes up to 142/195 considering that the 5ns SGRAM can probably go over 200MHz without a problem.