ASUS Tek is primarily known for their stellar motherboards. Their BX based P2B being our own favorite. But as with so many other Taiwanese manufacturers, ASUS also diverges into many other market segments, including SCSI host adapters, CD-ROM drives, notebook computers, networking products, even full servers and of course graphics cards. ASUS is to graphics cards in South East Asia what Diamond is to most of us folks over here in the US. They are the 'top of the Taiwanese-crop' and have already graced the market with the original TNT range last year (AGP-V3400TNT 8MB, AGP-V3400TNT 16MB, AGP-V3400TNT-TV 8MB, AGP-V3400TNT-TV 16MB). Naturally, with NVIDIA announcing the new TNT2 and UltraTNT2 chipsets, ASUS was first in line (at least in Taiwan) to get their lorry load of samples. And samples they did indeed get. Currently ASUS has three different versions of the TNT2 based 3800 range on their roster- the AGP-V3800 BASIC, the AGP-V3800 TVR and the AGP-V3800 DELUXE.

Although the 'branding' isn't quite as snazzy as the 'Viper' or the 'Dynamite' range, what matters is- what's under the hood. The AGP V3800 TVR and BASIC both use NVIDIA's TNT2 chipset, which is clocked at the default 125MHz speed. They both sport a 32MB SGRAM layout (clocked at 150MHz). The DELUXE version differs considerably, in that the UltraTNT2 chipset is used, clocked at 150MHz. In addition to the TV-Out and LCD port it also comes with a set of 3D Glasses. For the purpose of this review, we took the 'DELUXE' version for a spin.

ASUS has stuck by NVIDIA's reference design and other than the heat sink and fan combination, there's nothing too dramatic to report. The UltraTNT2 chipset remains extremely cool and its safe to say that NVIDIA's die-shrink to .25micron was a success. Most UltraTNT2 parts will ship out of the box at 150MHz/183MHz and indeed the ASUS 3800 DELUXE falls into this category. That's not to say that one can't overclock the product to 175MHz/200MHz because we very capably did just that- there were absolutely no lock ups, we might add. But for the purpose of this review we'll stick to the 'default' speed because that is the state the board will be in when you install it. (The Hercules' Dynamite TNT2 ships at 175/200MHz and hence we reviewed it based upon those frequencies.)