Asus AGP-V6800 Deluxe and Creative Labs Annihilator Pro Review – THG.RU

Introduction

Continuing with our coverage of GeForce based cards, we are now bringing you two new competitors to decide upon. Currently there are few decent choices as far as graphics chipsets go and an abundance of choices when it comes to boards based on the excellent GeForce chipset (reviewed last year in the article Full Review of NVIDIA’s new GeForce 256 ‘GPU’). This is a huge reason why we have done so many reviews on the different flavors available of this graphics chipset. Leading edge performance and features make this solution the most relevant solution on the market today for most gamers and performance buffs. In this latest installment we bring you the Asus AGP-V6800 Deluxe and the Creative Labs Annihilator Pro. Both boards are the GeForce DDR flavor from each company. We’ve previously reviewed the Asus AGP-V6600 Deluxe (GeForce SDR SGRAM) and Creative Labs Annihilator (GeForce SDR) and now it’s time to take a look at their more powerful siblings.

The Companies

AsusTek (Asus) is one of the biggest names in the industry right now producing top-notch motherboards and graphics solutions. Their products have been synonymous with the words quality and performance but never left your billfold feeling too empty. Armed with a leading edge R&D team, Asus is able to provide customers with rock solid hardware and software utilities that are backed by a long history of good customer satisfaction. I don’t know of many companies that I can honestly say do a better job than Asus.

Creative Labs came to us way back in the early 1990’s offering this nifty sound card called the “Sound Blaster” that became ultra-popular with many consumers which propelled the company to expand its market to what we know now. This expansion in the “multimedia sector” included graphics solutions, web cams, DVD solutions, and other various multimedia upgrades. Although the latest audio solutions have been subject to much debate on their quality and compatibility, the graphics solutions offered have been regarded as a great “bang for the buck” solution. Not only has Creative been offering competitive hardware but took extra steps to offer customers software and utilities that would enhance their experience beyond what can be found in their competitors packages (i.e. Unified Driver, AGP utility, O/C Utilities).

The Features

The AGP-V6800 Deluxe comes with a number of features that are unique to the typical GeForce board. Its layout is a bit different from your average GeForce DDR board but that is to be expected since the card has the video in capability that adds various extra components. On the backside of the card you have VR-Glasses output, S-video input, HD15 monitor connection (the ‘normal’ monitor connection), S-video output and a composite out. The retail package (Deluxe version) includes these items in the box:

• Manual
• VR 3D Glasses
• Video cables (S-video cable, Composite cable, S-video to composite cable)
• Software Bundle (Asus DVD player, Ulead Video Studio SE, Rollcage, Drakan, CD game sampler)

The manual was noteworthy as it offered very detailed instructions for those who aren’t too technically inclined with computers. Like many of their motherboard manuals, the V6800 manual offered useful information that shows you how to adjust various software settings or use their video capture software. It’s not going to make the card faster but makes life easier when trying to use some of their proprietary software. The 3D Glasses haven’t changed much since I last tried. The glasses work fairly well, however for those with corrective lenses the additional weight may be somewhat uncomfortable. The video cables are pretty standard. They could be picked up at the local video store, however, the fact that the card offers video-in is pretty cool (descent resolution you can capture at, I might add) although the card doesn’t come with a video input device, you’ll have to provide your own (web cam, video camera etc.). I also liked the fact that Asus provides a beta driver that stays somewhat near to NVIDIAs latest reference drivers if you feel the need to use them (as I did). I also was pleased with the various tweak and monitoring utilities that the card came with right ouf of the box. The Asus DVD player is the same standard player they’ve been shipping for some time now. As for the remaining software, a couple of free games and a CD sampler aren’t too horrible but don’t really interest me personally. Overall I would say the hardware and software features of the V6800 Deluxe were above average and the fact that the card comes with video out just adds extra appeal to this card.

The Features – Continued

The Creative Labs Annihilator Pro hardware-wise is just your basic DDR GeForce bundled with a few mediocre programs and utilities. Here is a list of what it came with:

• Manual
• Creative Drivers
• NVIDIA High IQ CD Sampler
• E-Colorific and 3Deep
• InterVideo WinDVD
• Evolva: Scout SE
• Need For Speed 4 (Full version)
• Dagoth Moor Zooligical Gardens (Technology Demo)

The software that the box shipped with, as you can see, isn’t the most exciting bundle but that’s not all you get. If you take a peek at what Creative is offering on their website, things change quiet a bit for the good. Browsing through the owners resources section of the Annihilator Pro section led me to a few utilities. I discovered the Creative Labs game launcher, overclocking utility, an AGP configuration utility and the ever intriguing Unified Driver (aka Glide wrapper). Each of these programs offered useful configuration abilities that should have come with the card, but at least something is available; period. The Game Launcher allows you to setup profiles for various games so that various D3D, OGL, Gamma or overclock settings are used when playing the game in question. The overclock utility is just what it sounds like but will hold settings in general (unlike the game launcher that does it per program). The AGP utility adds the ability to toggle things such as the AGP mode (1x, 2x, 4x), sideband addressing, AGP aperture size and the infamous “fast writes” option. The Unified Driver has been available from Creative for time now. This driver allows NVIDIA based cards (TNT, TNT2, GeForce) to run Glide based titles (albeit at a performance hit). The hardware might be average but the utilities Creative provides on their website is big plus in my book.

The Drivers

The drivers for the AGP-V6800 are basically the same as the AGP-V6600 aside from a few minor information differences. To take a deeper look at these drivers, please refer to the AGP-V6600 Deluxe Win98 drivers. Let’s take a look at the Game Launcher software. Although it’s not directly a part of the driver, it does add extra configuration ability.

This is the main Game Launcher window that lets you pick what program you care to configure.

After you’ve selected what program you wish to configure (in our case, Quake 3), You can pick just how or what you’d like to configure. Take a look at the available option windows.

The Drivers – Continued

There isn’t anything too complicated about this program but it may have some uses if you have games that vary in settings that they run best at. You can also fine-tune those overclocking settings for the games that let you really push the limits while keeping the ones that aren’t so friendly at normal levels.

The complete set of Creative drivers is identical to those we reviewed in our Annihilator review. If you’d like to refresh your memory as to what they offered, please refer back to our article Battle of the Titans: Creative Labs Annihilator vs. Leadtek WinFast GeForce 256.

The ‘Other’ GeForce Boards

We’re now up to nine GeForce cards reviewed and features that each offers are getting tough to remember so I’ve created a table containing some of the major features of each card for you to refer back to.

* Researched street price. Prices may vary.

I researched the prices on the web and through local shops to come up with relatively reasonably low street prices that one could get the hardware for. You’ll notice that the prices have changed pretty dramatically from the last time we looked at them. Being able to pick up a GeForce DDR for less than $240 is a promising sign for those who are on a tight budget.

The ‘Other’ GeForce Boards – Continued

For full detail on each card we’re reviewed previously, refer back to these links:

• Battle of the Titans: Creative Labs Annihilator vs. Leadtek WinFast GeForce 256
• Asus AGP-V6600 Deluxe Review
• Leadtek WinFast GeForce 256 DDR Review
• ELSA Erazor X and Absolute Multimedia Outrageous 3D GeForce Review
• ELSA Erazor X^2 GeForce Review

There are a couple of updates to these reviews that I wanted to share. Two cards, the Leadtek WinFast GeForce DDR and Absolute Multimedia O3D DDR, are now both shipping with improved version of their boards. Take a peek at the new versions of each below.

You’ll notice that the cooling solution is a much improved on the newer board. You can see a picture of the older version right here.

The Leadtek board went from a normal cooling solution to this monster heat sink that’s coupled with the same fan. I’m sure overclocking fans can appreciate this right out of the box. To see the old version, click here.

The Competition

The NVIDIA GeForce chipset based cards are great solutions available right now but just what else is out there at the moment and what might we be seeing in the near future? Let’s take a look at each company at a glance.

3dfx has been unfortunate to have major delays on their latest product and has taken major flak from many of the online press for it. What seemed like a cool product months ago is now turning into average as folks like ATi and NVIDIA will soon be offering products that may be just as fast and offer the once unique features it had. On top of this, 3dfx’s upcoming Voodoo4/5 cards do not have the T&L ability that everyone is moving to. I will give them credit that most software companies haven’t moved onto the T&L bandwagon yet but by the time they ship, many people will be curious or interested in T&L that’s coming soon and just might skip their product to go with something “safe” that supports it. I think the biggest thing that 3dfx has going for them in their upcoming cards is the fact that they promise killer fill-rates. We’re of course assuming this so don’t hold your breath. NVIDIA, ATi and Matrox were all gaining ground after all those delays. 3dfx will be showing what they’ve got to offer this month so we’ll see.

The Rage Fury MAXX wasn’t released long ago and is currently ATi’s flagship graphics card. Although the card performance isn’t too shabby, the cost for the performance have rated it a card I would pass on as there are so many better choices at the same price. However, the MAXX will probably be short lived as ATi recently released some information about their next generation product. It is said to have incredible fill-rates. T&L that is an improvement over what NVIDIA is currently offering, and a few other unique special effects. We should be seeing hardware in the coming weeks as well as a full-depth analysis of the graphics engine.

Bitboys are a new player in this area of well established players but is showing the hardcore graphics community some pretty promising technology as they plan to release detailed information on their product this month (supposedly). Extreme Bandwidth Architecture (XBA) is something that I’m really looking forward to as it’s a change from the norm and promises to kick major behind. XBA is essentially imbedded DRAM into the graphics core. This gives the Bitboys the control to make the memory bus as wide as they’d like it to be (rumored to be 512-bit vs. the conventional 128-bit) and control over the speed at which the memory runs at since its internal. Granted there are limitations on the speed but such easy control over the memory bus width is going to give them killer memory bandwidth. The drawbacks? Well we’ve never seen a product from this company (keep in mind that they recently missed a self-set release date) and we’re still waiting on more details so until they ship, it’s all hype.

Matrox has been extremely quiet on what they’re up to and unfortunately I have zero information on what’s to come. As soon as I find out, however, you can bet you’ll see a post.

Our current reigning champion of 3D, NVIDIA, hasn’t been sitting back wasting the money you’ve been spending to buy their cards but has actually been improving the existing product. Rumor has it that we’ll see the die shrink we never saw (less heat, more frequency), increased performance in the rendering pipelines (multi-texturing per pipeline and/or filtering), and rumored to have improved T&L ability due to popular demand. I can’t give more detail than that but we’ll see what’s going on in the next few weeks.

One of the biggest flops in my opinion this past year (aside from RAMBUS) was the Savage 2000. I really don’t appreciate the fact that their product hasn’t lived up to many people’s expectation because it puts so much pressure on the great press people and driver guys I know at S3. There has been much criticism about S3 technical support, that the card came up short on performance, T&L didn’t ship enabled on the card and the list goes on. So what do we have to look forward to in the near future? An improved version of the S2000 from what I hear. I wonder if the S2000 T&L unit was just buggy in the first place and driver fixes were merely software workarounds. Maybe this next release will be the “working” T&L unit that has greater clock speeds and will allow S3 to compete as they had once hoped. Well, it had better be more than that because the competition is flexing much more than average hardware.

Overclocking

Finding the best setting for each card was gone by cycling Quake3 demo1 overnight. The temperature was taken at the end of the testing run when I checked to see if the system was still running. Both cards found their happiest setting at 135MHz core/333MHz memory running Quake3 all night like a champ. Anything more and I had unstable results within the first few minutes. Both also registered a 76 degree Celsius heat rating that was measured on the backside of the graphics chip. Results will vary card to card so don’t be surprised if you can exceed the rather modest settings I achieved.

Benchmark Setup

Benchmark Expectations and Notes

I expect both GeForce based cards to dominate the tests over the competing chipsets (notice we used the latest drivers) and that the Asus V6800 will have a slight advantage as its driver is based on a reference driver that is quiet a bit newer than what the Creative Labs Annihilator Pro comes with. This advantage may be more apparent in some resolution more than others.

You’ve probably noticed by now that we’ve upped our test platform to something much more powerful than before. As far as graphics card concerned, this platform is the best test bed for comparing graphic boards as it provides the latest AGP technologies and supports the fastest available processors. This choice was made to offer pure graphics analysis. Future articles may offer supplemental information that will compare the effects of slower platforms on various graphics solutions but from now on, our standard graphics test suite will use this platform.

Much of our test suite is getting a bit dated as most of the boards are able to achieve very high framerates in various tests so I’ve removed a few that I felt were way too easy. Keep an eye out for an addition to our benchmark suite next review, as we’ll most likely have an addition or two from recently released games.

Benchmark Results – Shogo

Here we have both GeForce boards sticking side by side as they maintain a nice lead in front of the other chipsets. Obviously all the cards perform well enough at this mode but we’re still in a really low resolution. Remember, at low resolution, fill-rate isn’t a factor and the performance is much more limited by the platform performance.

The Asus V6800 has taken a slight lead over the Annihilator Pro but we are likely seeing this due to the Asus board having the driver built on a later reference driver.

The V6800 maintains a 5% lead over the Annihilator while they both stomp on the other cards. The VD3 3500 played the demo back but missing most of the textures so the score was defaulted to a 0.

Benchmark Results – Descent 3 DirectX

Descent 3 at this resolution isn’t giving most of the boards any problems. We see that the GeForce cards are still tied up top while the G400 MAX and VD3 3500 aren’t too far behind. The S2000 managed to score a decent result but it pales when compared to any of the other cards in its class.

The V6800 once again is showing us that it has a performance advantage over the Annihilator thanks to the drivers. You’ll notice the competition has dropped off considerably from the other chipsets.

Here we have the V6800 once again pulling into the lead as the Annihilator comes up short. The remaining cards have trouble keeping in the same ballpark as the fill-rate demands increased.

Benchmark Results – Descent 3 OpenGL

Our competing GeForce boards are tied up top while the other cards obviously don’t have an OpenGL ICD that is solid all around. The Viper II was missing a heavy amount of textures so it defaulted to a 0 score.

The Annihilator shows a slight lead but at that framerate, that advantage is within an acceptable margin of error so it can’t really be considered much of an advantage.

In OpenGL it appears that the slight advantage that Asus had is gone as the Annihilator and V6800 basically tied on each test.

Benchmark Results – Quake 3 Arena High Quality

Now that we’re in OpenGL again, the cards are performing identically again. The G400 MAX provides a fairly decent result as the S2000 offers mediocre performance. The VD3 3500 was unable to run in 32-bit color mode.

Things are still tied up top with the GeForce boards as I expected but what does strike me is the sad performance of the S2000. I thought they prided in high resolution/color performance. I hardly call 30 FPS something to be proud about when the competition is providing nearly double that.

Hammering the cards at 1600×1200 in high quality brings all the cards to their knees. Notice how well the G400 MAX did, not too shabby.

Benchmark Results – 3DMark 2000 Game1 16-bit color

The test GeForce cards are side by side as they pass up all the competition without much trouble.

Although both GeForce boards are tied up to, the competition is too far behind. This is a bit surprising.

None of the scores were acceptable but you can see that the GeForce boards are still consistently tying for the top spots while the competition struggles to keep anywhere near them.

Benchmark Results – 3DMark 2000 Game 1 32-bit color

Just when it looked like the V6800 had the superior DX driver, the Annihilator starts putting some ground between the two. Use of the reference driver would probably be the best for performance all around.

One of the highest settings in our 3DMark testing brings all our scores to less than an acceptable 30 FPS. Both GeForce boards do manage to tie up top.

Unfortunately neither GeForce card was able to run in this mode. Although the G400 MAX didn’t provide at least 30 FPS, at least it was able to complete the benchmark in this mode.

After looking back at the results, I still feel that the GeForce DDR based boards are king of the hill when it comes to performance. The performance difference between the two GeForce boards themselves is pretty negligible as both tied for the lead several times and they each took a brief lead at some points. After seeing both cards provide different results in the same test by merely switching APIs, I feel that the software driver is what is providing the performance differences between the two. If we had used the reference driver, I doubt there would be much variance in their scores.

Conclusion

Asus is offering a nice package in the AGP-V6800 as it has GeForce DDR performance, dependable quality, video in/out and ships with good drivers/utilities. However, if you want this excellent package, you’re going to pay for what you get. At nearly $300, the card comes at a premium cost when the price is compared to other GeForce DDR cards. The video in feature is where most would decide between this fine card and the less expensive alternatives.

Creative Labs supplies consumers with a basic GeForce DDR board that performs just as good as they come while also offering a few interesting utilities and drivers on their website. The biggest drawback is the lack of video in/out support. Bar that drawback, it’s hard to ignore going with the Annihilator Pro for the killer price.

For me the biggest factors in choosing the best GeForce card are pretty basic. I want the best performance for a good price. I’m not really into using video on my machine for anything. Pairing the reference NVIDIA drivers with any of the boards we have reviewed in the past will give you the best performance and stability you can get so software isn’t an issue. With this in mind and the latest street prices, my current choice for best GeForce board would be the Creative Labs Annihilator Pro. With the ability to have the best performance available at a mere $239 and the option to use Creative’s various utilities, I find the Annihilator Pro to be an excellent bargain. Let’s hope that we see the same type of competition around when the NV15 series (the upcoming graphics chipset from NVIDIA) comes out, as it will greatly benefit consumers.