Video Excursion with the Asus V7700 Deluxe — THG.RU

Introduction

With the ongoing battle between ATi and NVIDIA reaching what many would consider a standoff in the high-end 3D performance arena, users are now looking at additional features that each company is offering in their boards. ATi will be releasing various performance versions of their Radeon as well as the popular video solution known as the «All in Wonder.» As many of you already know, various manufacturers produce NVIDIA-based products so each company sets their own configurations. One such company is Asus who has been making NVIDIA based product since the days of the TNT chipset. Like ATi, Asus has produced a versatile line of products but using the latest and greatest NVIDIA chipset (like the GeForce2). One of the most fully featured GeForce2 boards available is the Asus V7700 Deluxe that I recently had the pleasure of reviewing. Typically we have focused on the mostly 3D performance in a majority of our graphic reviews but your requests for more information on the video aspects of these «All in Wonder» and «Deluxe» versions has prompted this review. We’ll still cover the 3D performance but focus more so on the software and hardware specific benefits to these solutions. For the time being, I only have the Asus V7700 Deluxe solution while I await the ELSA VIVO module upgrade and the Radeon «All in Wonder» to ship. With this in mind, let’s take a deeper look at the V7700 Deluxe.

The Board

The «deluxe» version of Asus cards typically denotes a multimedia-geared product where the «pure» series was a more stripped down, performance oriented offering. In the case of the V7700 Deluxe, the GeForce2 is still the heart of the graphics solution but it has been augmented with video in and out hardware as well as the software to support it. On top of all this, Asus has thrown in their 3D Glasses to give users the full VR experience. If you need further information on the GeForce2 chipset and what it is capable of, please refer to the following links:

• Tom’s Take On NVIDIA’s New GeForce2 GTS
• NVIDIA GeForce2 GTS Battle Royal
• Asus AGP-V7700 Pure Review
• The Fastest GeForce2 GTS Card — Gainward’s CARDEXpert GeForce2 GTS/400
• Battle of the Titans 2: Creative Labs’s Annihilator 2 vs. Absolute Multimedia’s Outrageous GeForce2 GTS

Above you can see all of the hardware contents of the V7700 Deluxe. You get the board, 3D Glasses, composite cable, S-Video cable and composite to S-video converter cable. Obviously software is included as well but we’ll get to that shortly. The quality of the hardware provided is just as good as what we seen in our V7700 Pure review (including the same speed memory) except that you’ll notice that we now have an abundance of video connection on the backside. You have VR-out, S-video in (converter cable included allows you to use composite in through here as well), VGA-out, S-video out and composite out. One big thing to note with the hardware provided in the Deluxe version vs. the Pure is that they both have the same clock settings for core and memory. This will not be true for the Radeon «All in Wonder» solution.

The Software

The driver interface is exactly the same as provided in the V7700 Pure product. If you wish to refresh your memory with what it looks like, please refer to the V7700 Pure driver interface pages. Where things get interesting, however, is the bundled software that makes the multimedia aspects of this product shine. Included with the bundle is Asus SmartDoctor (same as V7700 Pure), Asus Tweak Utility (same OC utility as in the V7700 Pure), Asus Video Security, Asus Digital VCR, Ulead VideoStudio, and Asus DVD. Two of the utilities in this list have already been examined in our old review but the other software is new to us so let’s review what each of them does.

The Software: Asus Video Security

Unfortunately my capture software couldn’t catch the video input (from my Canon ES190 camcorder) that should be where the pink window is but that’s where it should be. The other window in my screenshot above is the log of the videos taken (one such video was taken in the sample screenshot). This utility might not be useful to many users but it did work very effectively. Keep in mind that you need to have some type of video camera input to allow this program to work. You can configure the program to take pictures of capture a certain amount of video every time motion is detected within the view area (or defined space within the picture) of the video device. The one thing I did note is that the computer hosting this software cannot be left as a secure station with the software loaded alone. If this program were really to be used, you would have to hide it away in a secure room. This feature might work very well for a small business as a low cost security system since the program not only captures video but also has the options to execute external programs, send an email, or even make a phone call.

Although I don’t see any use for this feature in my daily routine, I did secure my lab for a couple days to see what happened after hours when I was gone. Unfortunately there are no spicy stories to share, as my janitorial staff was very professional when servicing my area in the evening time. The system took a measured 4-second length of video (that I specified) and two snapshots every time motion was detected during those late night visits without a glitch.

The Software: Asus Digital VCR

The Asus Digital VCR software allowed me to do several things from video capture in various formats to letting me set my input video (configurable within the program) as the background picture (made things very distracting to work on). There are more options available within the software but an optional «tuner box» is needed to enable them.

The Software: Ulead VideoStudio

Video Studio SE from Ulead is a video capture and editing software that let’s you basically do everything you’ll need to make a home video. A whole article can be written on this software alone if we wanted to. Video Studio takes you step by step through making a video. Each step starts with a useful tips window that helps novice users through the whole process. With this powerful software you are able to capture video, arrange video clips, edit video footage, save in various formats and much more. The humorous thing about all of this is that ATi has been using Ulead Video Studio and will even do so with the Radeon «All in Wonder» product. This means that ATi will have to prove itself video king through hardware since Asus has now coupled the GeForce2 with the very same software. All in all, this software is by far the best video editing software I’ve used.

The Software: Asus DVD

As with the V7700 Pure, the Asus DVD player offers all the performance and DVD functionality you’ll ever need. When it comes to software DVD players nowadays, the only big difference seems to be the quality of the playback. After watching a few clips from various DVD movies, I’m still confident that the GeForce2 along with the Asus DVD software provides excellent DVD playback speed and picture quality.

Video Performance

I’ve been toying with some testing methodology when it came to testing the in/output of our multimedia graphics cards and decided on a few simple methods in which I can test each. For our input, I’ve tested our Canon camcorder through S-video as well as our Sony DVP-S530D hardware DVD player. For output, I am pushing DVD playback from the PC to our Sony KV-24FV10 Trinitron television through S-video. The last test will be to use the provided software to create a video in a certain format at a good resolution to see what type of quality and playback performance we can achieve.

Input quality is about what I expected from our V7700 Deluxe output. The camcorder provided semi blurry input but the input from the DVD was definitely clear when compared. I’m sure that if I had been equipped with a DV capable camcorder that picture quality would improve greatly as the V7700 Deluxe does claim to support DV input although I was unable to test it. I’ll try to have a DV capable camcorder for our update.

Output quality of the V7700 was excellent as well. Text was probably the biggest problem but that was due to the TV and not the video output. DVD playback quality was also excellent. If I switched back and forth between my hardware DVD player and the PC, I could pick up a few minor differences but I doubt most of you will notice unless you’re a video fanatic. Of course, if you were this into DVD playback, you would be solely using your hardware DVD player.

Using the Ulead software I decided to create two MPGEG-2 videos (one outdoor and one indoor) at full NTSC resolution (720×480) and see what type of frame rate and visual quality I would have. Keep in mind that my Camcorder that is not digital provides output at 525 lines of resolution. I figured that using a digital camcorder would be too high-end for this review since the digital camcorders start costing over $700. My final results looked as clear as they could for the resolution the camcorder was giving the V7700 Deluxe and the frame rate was nearly 30 FPS. Obviously the file size was enormous (due to the resolution and quality settings I used) even though I was using MPEG-2 but overall I would have to say I was happy with the results. It should be interesting to see what happens when we line-up the Radeon «All in Wonder» with this board as one of its biggest advantages was its video editing software.

3D Glasses

The Asus 3D glasses were a bit of a pain to wear being that I wear prescription glasses normally. You have to enter the display properties and enable the 3D glasses option in each of the APIs before use so I made sure D3D and OpenGL were both enabled. The 3D glasses seemed to work well in only one game I tested (Expendable) and it looked fantastic! The only problem was that it didn’t seem to work with any of my other games. I’m assuming that there still some kinks to be removed before most software can be played in 3D glasses mode but once they do, it’s going to be a blast.

The Competition

Many of our readers have been using older solutions to provide the video tasks they require but have requested that we find newer graphics solutions for them that provide the excellent 3D performance that the older models lack. This is a huge reason why I wanted to gather all the available VIVO NVIDIA solutions as well as the ATi «All in Wonder» product. We should have a VIVO modified ELSA product within the next few weeks as well as ATi’s video powerhouse shortly after that. For the time being however, the V7700 Deluxe stands alone.

Test Setup

Performance Expectations

I obviously expect the V7700 Deluxe to perform on par with the Pure model or any other 32MB GeForce2 based product as the core and memory speed are set to the standard settings. We don’t have a Radeon 32MB model yet so the 64MB results were compared. As we’ve seen in the past reviews, I expect the 32MB GeForce2 to hold well against everything but the larger memory GeForce2 and at higher resolutions, the Radeon.

Test Results — Quake 3 Arena Demo001

As expected the V7700 Deluxe does excellent across the board. The only time in which it begins to fall behind is in the high quality testing coupled with the upper resolutions.

Test Results — Expendable Demo

Aside from 16-bit color all our contestants are pretty even across the testing. Keep in mind that Expendable is probably one of the lesser rigorous of our 3D benchmarks.

Test Results — Evolva Rolling Demo

The V7700 does extremely well in this difficult benchmark as it only falls behind the 64MB GeForce2 board. The Radeon doesn’t seem to have much of a chance in non-Bump Mapped mode.

Test Results — Evolva Rolling Demo Bump Mapped

Things still look for Asus here until we switched into 32-bit mode. Having 32-bit color and bump mapping enabled, things put too much of a stress on the memory limited 32MB card. Things still aren’t too bad even in the cases where the V7700 Deluxe falls behind.

Performance Conclusion

There were no shocking surprises when it came to the performance of the V7700 Deluxe. It was right on with what we’ve seen with other 32MB GeForce2 boards. Don’t let the mass of video features fool you, this card is just as fast as any of the other available 32MB GeForce2 solutions.

Conclusion

Although we are unable to bring you a direct comparison at this time, we can give you the scoop on what we do have which is the Asus V7700 Deluxe. The Asus multimedia solution is offering us top-notch 3D performance, very good video quality, excellent video editing software and quality hardware that we have come to expect from Asus.

There are no minuses to be found in the Deluxe model aside from the high retail cost (for those who don’t need the video options) of about $319. If you’re in the market for a 3D graphics solution that is smoking’ fast and coupled with video in/out capabilities, I can’t see any other choice but to go with the Asus V7700 Deluxe until ELSA and ATi are able to produce something to give it a challenge.