Reviews / previews
Hey, isn't Asus a motherboard company? Well, yes. But on top of making very powerful motherboards, it also produces CD-ROMs, notebooks, and oh yes, graphics cards. The 3800 Deluxe distinguishes itself from its 3800 series siblings by showing up as a very complete package.
This all-in-one card is really all-in-one. A colleague bugged me about getting his hands on the 3800 Deluxe because he recently moved into a new apartment and didn't have a chance to hook himself up with a TV yet. (We are just poor journalists, after all.) Why did he want this card? The plan was to plug his VCR into his card's video input so he could watch tapes on his PC. Pretty nifty idea.
The 3800 Deluxe also comes with 3D glasses--folks who have experience with graphics-card producer Metabyte's version will be familiar with these--plus a couple of games (Extreme-G 2 and Turok 2: Seeds of Evil), DVD acceleration software, and an over-clocking utility. In the complete-package category, the 3800 Deluxe wins hands down.
Installation was hassle-free, and the drivers disk has a handy GART driver. The setup automatically identifies your motherboard's chipset and asks you if you want to install the GART driver to "support AGP functionality for the chipset on your PC's motherboard." Pretty handy for those of us who've had problems with AGP.-- Danny W. Lam / GamePro
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