As few as two years ago, if you had asked any of us at AnandTech which company was dominating the market for video card products, not a single one of us would have answered ASUS. Sure, for motherboards ASUS has always been a leader of the pack, creating great products with unsurpassed quality, but as far as video cards were concerned, ASUS was a non-factor It was not until ASUS's break into the video card market with the TNT based V3400 did the company begin to capture a strong hold on the graphics market.

The idea does not seem novel to us now, but ASUS decision to expand from being a motherboard producer to a video card powerhouse was considered quite revolutionary. On the other hand, ASUS saw it as a David versus Goliath situation: it could use its motherboard foundation to produce some of the greatest video cards on the market. ASUS seized the opportunity to extend their market to video cards as well as to continue their almost renowned quality. ASUS's dream of domination originally became a reality with the V3400. This dream, however, has continued throughout the years, a fact which may be seen with their most recent GeForce addition: the V6600 Deluxe, a card quite worthy of the V series name.

Specifications, courtesy of ASUS:

• Quad Engine Architecture
  Four independent pipelined engines
  15M triangles/second
  Sustained DMA, transform/clip/light, setup, and render rate
  >70% of the chip active at all times
  Up to 6 triangles "in flight" at a time (typically 1-3)
  Very low latency between engines
• ASUS Smart Doctor Technologies
  Provides the best system safety
  SmartCooling Technology
  Dynamic overclocking
  Over-heat protection
  Fan RPM monitoring
  AGP power level Monitoring
• AGP-V6600 Takes Interactive PC Graphics to More Realistic and Detailed Levels
  Full frame rate DVD to 1080 resolution
  Full precision subpixel accuracy to 1/16 pixel
  5 horizontal, 3 vertical taps
  8:1 up/down scaling
  Independent hue, saturation and brightness controls in hardware
• Optimized for the latest DirectX 7 and OpenGL features
  Transform and lighting (T&L)
  Cube environment mapping
  Vertex blending
  Protective textures
  Texture compression
  
• Superior 2D Performance
  256-bit 2D rendering pipeline
  4 pixels per clock on all scaled and indexed image operations
  1 GB/s CPU-to-GPU memory via AGP 4X with Fast Writes
• AGP 4X with Fast Write
  Enables CPU to send data directly to GPU
  System memory bus free to perform other functions
  Balanced design increases overall system performance
• High Quality Video Playback: DVD Acceleration
  Full frame rate DVD to 1080i resolution
  Full precision subpixel accuracy to 1/16 pixel
• High Quality Video Playback: Video Overlay
  5 horizontal, 3 vertical taps
  8:1 up/down scaling
  Independent hue, saturation, and brightness controls in hardware
• 3D Stereoscopic Features
  Turns D3D games into virtual reality gaming world
  VR Viewer software bundled for 3D pictures viewing
• Video Features for Video-in
  Complete S-VHS and Composite video-input ports support
  ASUS Live driver supports 704x480 real time video capture (for Windows 95/98 only)
• Video Features for TV-out
  Digital video output by integrated NTSC/PAL encoders
  Complete S-VHS and Composite video-input ports support
  High quality TV-out supports 800x600 resolutions