Asus GF3 deluxe owners, happy with ur purchase ?

[Vad3r]

I've put my upgrade bundle together, and I've decided on the GF3 Ti200 Deluxe. So, before I put the money out for it, I would like to hear some thoughts on it. I currnently have a voodoo3 3000, and have no complaints about it's Desktop look to it. I have 19" Moniter and have it @ 32bit color 1280x1024. It's just not up to par for gaming any longer.
I have never seen a Geforce of any flavor, and have only read that some of them don't look as nice as voodoo and ATI in the desktop field. I play but one game, (quake3) so I know I'll be happy there.
I choose the Deluxe so that I can copy my home movies to CD-R (tapes wear out just sitting on the shelf over the years).
In Cdn dollars, this card is $340 without tax (the Ti 500- $520 - this is not in my budget), this is alot of money for me after also getting new MB, CPU, and RAM. So I just have to ask if it's worth it.
I prolly be going with W2K (maybe XP) for O/S, so the ATI is out for me.

Thx for any input on this, and thx to the "General Hardware section" for guiding me to AMD.

 

[Whizzy]

Well i'll give you my opinion if you like

I bought the Asus Deluxe 8200 (ti200) and i upgraded from an Creative Geforce1 SDR. The performance increase was offcourse enormous !! i can play any game at 1280x1024x32 (rtcw for example) with everything but then even everything on and no slowdown's.. (single player)..

I also copied some VHS tapes to my Harddrive in order to backup them to CD, i'm not completely overwhelmed by the quality of the input signal of the VHS tape... its not completely clean and smooth, but then again this could be due to a bad video-recorder. Overall, after DIvx encoding to the movies i can have roughly 1.5 our videotape on 1 cd.. with 'relative' good quality but that is purely my opinion.

(almost forgot)

I capture the tapes at 25fps/ 320x258 (something like that) and with 16bit/44khz/mono sound. and not a single frame drop while directly encoded using a encoder plugin which gives me 10:1 ratios.. it's like 1 gigabyte of space for 1 hour tape.

Then the extra features, 3d glasses ( haven't tried yet), video output.. = great, but i'm waiting on TvTool6 which has outstanding support for the tv-output chip.

Overclocking: standard is 175/400 i believe.. i have mine at: 200/500 which results in 7400 3dmark2001 points.

2d Quality = good i run it at 1280x960 at 32 Bit. using the 23.11 drivers.

I'm very happy with this card and keep waiting for some better video input capture drivers ! until then i frag some away in UT or QIII

 

[Vad3r]

well thx for the input.



<< I capture the tapes at 25fps/ 320x258 (something like that) and with 16bit/44khz/mono sound >>



Would u happen to know if that is VCD complient, or, are there many choices to capture in, and thats the one u have found best for you. I have found CD-R's that work in my DVD player. I have some music video's in .mpg that I have burned, and they work. The only way I know if they are complient or not, is if Nero tells me so when I try to drag them over
If I can get home movies working on the DVD player, the wife won't be so mad at me spending all this money

And of course, I'll prolly give RTCW a go when I have a system that can play it.

Oh, and can it do any of the neat things that the ATI AIW card can do (transparent desktop and stuff). Think I read in one of the reviews for this card that you can get a tv-tuner attachment thats made for the Asus GF3.

 

[rbV5]

<< I prolly be going with W2K (maybe XP) for O/S, so the ATI is out for me. >>



Why is that? My ATI cards have always worked great in 2K, and now XP. I wouldn't think of running anything but NTFS for video work. No complaints here. I'd look at the new AIW 7500, should be able to get a nice price in Canada, and it would play Q3a great, and has most of the features of the 8500dv.

 

[Vad3r]

Well, for the ATI, I have read up some reviews of it. It sounds like a nice card, but always mention of there drivers not being up to par. In Toronto there is this local TV Show "The ComputerManics", one host of the show bought the AIW 8500. Showed some of it's cool features with a video camera hooked up and stuff, but near every 5 minutes joked about how poor the drivers were for games (on XP). Also, he did say his main goal was for Video editing, and seemed pleased with it in that area. Wish they had been more specific, did they mean slow fps in games, or crashing while playing games ?.
Also, I may be wrong, but I thought I read that the AIW was only going to have drivers for XP ?.
I may not play many games, but I the idea of being able to buy pretty much buy any game and have it work correctly (nvidia).
There seems to be a trade off with either you choose, ATI- crisp looking Video (2d & 3d), nVidia- crisp looking 3d only (but fast).
Wish I knew someone that owned one so I could see it's performance for myself.

 

[Rand]

ATi's last few driver releases have improved the drivers considerably. Their still not perfect, but their definitely usable at this point and you shouldnt have many problems at all.

Oh, you might want to pass on Asus if you need good 2D quality. Asus tends to be lacking in that regard... with exception to their Ti500 card which is actually rather decent for 2D.