Installation of the Asus V6800 went pretty quick and trouble free. I didn't have to install any drivers at all as the old video card was a Creative Annihilator Pro running the new reference 5.08 drivers. The rest of the stuff are:

• Athlon 850
• Asus K7M Motherboard
• In Win 24" Case With 300 Watts PS
• 128 Megs Corsair PC-133 SDRAM
• Acer 50X CD ROM
• Quantum KA 18 GIG 7200 RPM HD
• Aureal Vortex SQ2500 PCI Sound Card
• Smarfast PCI NIC
• Windows 98 SE

Unlike the Creative Annihilator Pro, the  V6800 had no problems running with the Athlon CPU. Everything I threw at it worked without a hitch. For benchmarks, I use Quake 2, Quake 3, Unreal, 3D Mark 99 and 3D Mark 2000. All setting were set at defaults settings except for Quake 3.

Quake 3 has so many user adjustable settings that there really is no set factory defaults. As a result, Quake 3 benchmarks are really useless unless the reviewer shows the settings they use. I decided to run the Quake 3 benchmarks the same way I play the game. My settings are:

Resolutions: 800x600, 1024x768, 1600x1200
Graphic mode: HIGH QUALITY
GL Driver: DEFAULT
GL extensions: ON
Color : 16 Bit and 32 BIT
Full screen: ON
Lighting: LIGHTMAP
Geometric detail: HIGH
Texture detail: 4
Texture quality: 16 BIT & 32 BIT
Texture Filter: BILINEAR

The game options are:

Marks on walls: NO
Ejecting brass:  NO
Dynamic lighting: NO
Identify target: YES
High quality sky: YES

The only things I really changed for the Quake 3 testing is the resolution and the color and texture depth. I found running the above settings gives me the best speed with very good image quality.

Next page: How fast is this thing?

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