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Asus V9999 Ultra Deluxe - GeForce 6800 Ultra Review. |
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Written by Mavke
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Wednesday, 06 October 2004 |
HotHardware sends word of their Asus V9999 Ultra Deluxe review. It seems that high-end graphics cards are always in the lime light upon the initial launch of a new graphics processor architecture from any of the major players. Although there's a limited number of potential consumers, relatively speaking, for these flagship enthusiat-class boards, they pave the way for their more modestly priced siblings, in terms of setting the standard for the base GPU architecture and how it performs versus the competition. We're sure many of you wouldn't think of dropping over $500 for an uber-class 3D card like a GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme Edition or Radeon X800 XT Premium Edition, but there are some who will spare no expense, and these cream-of-the-crop video cards drive stakes in the ground of the fiercely competitive 3D graphics hardware landscape.
 Asus V9999 Ultra Deluxe - GeForce 6800 Ultra Review.
Asus once again has put together a very strong offering with its latest GeForce 6800 Ultra-based product. From its game bundle to the optional USB Webcam right on down to that blue light special heatsink assembly, it is obvious that Asus has tried to position this GeForce 6800 Ultra as a breakout product in a sea of reference designs. For the most part, the company has succeeded in this effort, offering 25MHz higher than stock core clock speeds in its GeForce 6800 Ultra GPU to boot.
The Asus V9999 Ultra Deluxe can currently be found online for as little as $554 sans the Webcam. Our contacts at Asus state that the MSRP with the package we tested should be $539 - $549 currently. However, we have yet to see this price and availability with the package we've shown you here, in the retail channel. We're hopeful that Asus has stronger availability in the U.S. moving forward. Regardless, this is a slightly inflated GeForce 6800 Ultra cost structure, one we feel is warranted, however, with the card's somewhat differentiated single slot cooler design and higher-than-stock core GPU clock speed. Not to mention the fact that we were hard-pressed to find any GeForce 6800 Ultra card in the channel currently for less than $539. Let's face it, if you are bellying up to this ultra high-end graphics card price point, a few more pesos for an optimized cooling design and higher core clock speed, covered by a three-year warranty, is probably money well spent.
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