LOSTCIRCUITS

Installation was, in all cases as uneventful as one could possibly hope, insert the card into the AGP slot, power up the system and run the install utility from the included CDROM. Here are a few screen shots from the ASUS control panel

V6600 main display properties panel

D3D, OpenGL and other properties can be adjusted in the advanced menu

V6600 advanced properties panel

Often, adjusting the resolution, results in a distorted screen. This can easily be corrected by clicking on the + or - for adjusting the refreshrate to the monitor without having to resize the screen

V6600 display controls. The adjustments for vertical and horizontal refresh rate are in the red circle

The drawback in all cases is that the drivers coming with the V6600 are revision 3.48 and thus are a bit behind the latest revision of nVidias reference drivers. On SS7 and Slot1 systems it is not that critical to upgrade to the 3.53 drivers, however, Athlon systems reportedly have difficulties with the older driver versions. Notedly, these difficulties are quite severe, since running the GeForce on the 3.48 drivers caused the system to crash more often within a single hour than in the 3 months before combined.

The problem

There is a problem though. Installation of the new reference drivers creates two entirely new registry entries and even though the drivers work perfectly, they are not suitable for benchmarking since the ASUS desktop utility won’t work anymore. Consequently there is no way to disable vsync. Overclocking utilities like Entech’s Powerstrip do not work either, since it is possible to disable vsync but the entry ends up in the wrong registry folder.

The workaround

• The workaround is actually very simple and here is the step by step instruction
• Install the new reference drivers.
• Install the ASUS drivers again (from the CD).
• Go to the control panel / display / adapter and select change
• Select compatible hardware and within the panel, the Win95/98 display drivers
• Now comes the tricky part since Windows will not find the driver file (remember, it is a self executing file) and will ask for the location of the driver file.
• Copy the name of the file, go to the start menu and run "find" for the file.
• The file’s location will show up within a subdirectory of the Windows Temp directory
• Go back to the control panel and enter the location of the file.

3D Glasses

The 3D glasses coming with the ASUS V6600 deluxe work, however, personally I have enough headaches without them and as nice as they are for specific 3D applications as there are anatomy tutorials and similar programs but for gaming, they are just a gimmick. Sorry that is just my own opinion on the matter.

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