Specs/Drivers

The List

0.18 micron manufacturing process
175MHz core clock
166MHz memory clock
2 pixels per clock cycle
350 Mpixels/s fill rate
4 texels per clock cycle
700 Mtexels/s fill rate
2.7 GB/s memory bandwidth
20 million triangles/sec
8-64MB frame buffer
32 MB RAM 128-bit Single Data Rate (SDR)
TwinView architecture
Digital Vibrance control
Integrated Dual-Link TMDS transmitters
NVIDIA Shading Rasterizer (NSR)
High-Definition Video Processor (HDVP)
AGP 4X with Fast Writes
32-bit color
32-bit Z/stencil buffer
Cube environment mapping
DirectX and S3 texture compression
350MHz RAMDAC

Drivers

Normally, the manufacturers' driver set consists of the NVIDIA reference drivers with a fancier install and different graphics. In this case, Asus has a few modifications that might be noteworthy. Along with providing support for their 3D glasses, there is a handy color utility. This utility allows you to predefine gamma, and other color-related settings, and save them as presets. NVIDIA reference drivers allow this, but they don't have support for saving settings for individual graphic APIs. With Asus's driver set, you can have an increased gamma setting for a game like Counter Strike and still not have to change the setting back if you want to play a quick match of Quake 3 or browse the web.

Another utility bundled with the ASUS card is Smart Doctor. Smart Doctor provides hardware monitoring, plain overclocking and dynamic overclocking, and finally, proactive cooling protection. You can find out more on Smart Doctor on this page in James' V6600 review.

Software

Along with the usual manufacturer driver set, the Asus card comes bundled with one game and the aforementioned color tweak utility. Soldier of Fortune, not to shabby for a game you get with a piece of hardware. In case you are in Germany, the game you will receive is Drakan. Quite a big trade-off if you ask me. But then again, you might as well take that up with your government, as SOF is banned in the land of large steins.

Along with the rest of the world, those of you in Germany will still receive the 3Deep color tweak utility. This allows you to correctly match your colors to the rest of the normal world. I believe most video cards ship with some variation of this program.

Also included in the bundle is the, now requisite, software DVD player. If a video card doesn't ship with one of these, I don't know what you bought.