The V7700 card

Board Layout

When drawing up the V7700, ASUS stuck pretty close to NVIDIA's reference design. This shouldn't come as a big surprise, ASUS stuck pretty close to the reference design with their original "Pure" line of video cards for the GeForce. The Deluxe model will most likely add several new features to the board design.

The ASUS V7700

V7700 back

GeForce 2 GTS reference board

Reference back

Like other GeForce 2 designs we've seen, the V7700 uses 6ns SGRAM manufactured by Infineon.

Infineon RAM

Cooling

As we mentioned earlier, the V7700 features a rather unique, Golden Orb-style cooling solution. We found temperatures ranged from 80-93 degrees Fahrenheit. The results aren't bad at all, but with the die shrink to 0.18-micron, all GeForce 2 cards run cooler than their predecessors. Oh well, it's still a pretty sweet-looking fan!

The heatsink/fan unit

Software bundle

Besides the aforementioned utilities, the V7700 comes with a software DVD player (ASUS DVD 2000) full versions of Drakan and Rollcage, and a "Games Power Pack 1" CD filled with demos of various games. You'll probably spend most of your time with the DVD player, and it gets the job done pretty well.

Overclocking

Reference overclocking slider

We didn't have any problems running the V7700 at 220MHz core/346MHz memory (the max allowed by the included ASUS tweak utility) so we installed the NVIDIA reference drivers and modified the Windows Registry to use the NVIDIA overclocking utility.

With the new slider in hand, we were able to overclock the V7700 to 240MHz core/365MHz memory.