As far as the driver CD goes, it comes complete with a BETA set of the NVIDIA 5.16 drivers (now two revisions old). Although the ASUS drivers are indeed nicely rounded off with fancy do-dads, such as the “Smart Doctor” utility (more on that in a jiffy), the functionality is the same as the reference drivers. You can disable V-sync (importantly), set your gamma, and enable full-scene AA.
Overclockers (the board came with 6ns Infineon DDR-SGRAM) will certainly appreciate the ASUS driver team’s efforts with “Smart Doctor”. The software graphically displays the information sent to it by the Winbond chip showing the core’s temperature, voltage and fan RPM. Overclockers can use this software and “dynamically” overclock (as ASUS likes to call it) the board, which the software does by determining what levels need to be set depending upon how taxing a 3D/2D app is. If you clock the board too high, the temperature sensor will then go ahead and clock the board down and act as a safeguard against doing any damage.
For the purpose of the review, we did use NVIDIA's latest revision, the 5.22 drivers, which are obviously newer than the 5.16BETA. That’s how we do things at SE- we use only the latest drivers and try to stray shy of BETA drivers when doing reviews.
Test System
- The Pentium III 800Mhz test bed:
- Dell Dimension XPS B800r
- Intel Vancouver i820 Mainboard
- 128MB RDRAM @ PC700 w/ECC
- IBM DPTA-372730 (27.3 gig) Hard Drive
- Creative SB Live (A06)
- 3C905C NIC Ethernet Card
- Hitachi GD-5000 8xDVD-ROM
- Windows 98 Second Edition
- DirectX 7.0a
- 3D Cards Used
- ASUS V7700 GeForce 2 GTS with 5.22 drivers
- NVIDIA GeForce 2GTS reference board with 5.22 drivers
- 3dfx Voodoo5 5500 AGP retail board running retail drivers and 1.06 BIOS
NVIDIA GeForce 256 DDR reference board running Detonator 3.68 Drivers with Fast Writes disabled.