ASUS GeForce3 Customer Support

[tvpincdoc]

I purchased an ASUS V8200 GeForce 3 card. It appears to run well in all aspects except OpenGL performance. I had a TNT2 Ultra card which ran at 112 million pixels/s on the same system. After installing the GeForce 3, this dropped to 24 million pixels/s.
I contacted ASUS customer service and got one reply. They suggested a newer driver. I downloaded their beta driver, and found that the performance had fallen to 12 million pixels/s. I have contacted them 10 times since, even giving them a notice that I expected some sort of contact within one month.
It has been one month and I still haven't heard, even to just have them say "I don't know".
I'm not sure if anyone can give me any other ideas (I have tried tweaking most of the options including the buffering and vertical sync, but if you know how to improve OpenGL, I'm willing to listen and try it), but I thought that anyone contemplating a purchase of a GeForce 3 might want to know the level of customer service that they can expect from ASUS. I wish that I had gone with the VisionTek after all.

[glc]

You are fortunate that you even got one reply - Asus does not support end users, only their distributors. They make it clear on their website that end user support is provided by who you bought it from.

[tvpincdoc]

Well, it's a pretty rotten way to treat a paying customer. Many people purchase from electronics superstores, etc. These places don't know enough to provide this sort of support. I never have had this problem with the other card makers.
The web site has changed. I found the e-mail support links there. Perhaps it is LEGALLY accurate to say that they don't provide support to their end users, but I still think an end user would be better off purchasing from a company that cares. Just my $0.02.

[Floppyman]

Have you tried the latest nvidia reference ("detonator") drivers for your card straight from nvidia to see if they help? Also what version of Direct X are you running and what OS?

www.nvidia.com

HTH

[Werewolfdaddy]

The new detonator drivers will free up your open gl. I have a geforce 3 and I have no complaints. Even with 4 pass anti-aliasing, I still scored over 5000 on the mad onion bench mark. The geforce came with my P4. It says asus 8200, but had S3 drivers installed. I quickly replaced them.

[tvpincdoc]

Sorry, I already tried that. I don't think that it is a driver problem as much as some sort of conflict. A company like ASUS would have the best idea about what it may conflict with. I'm already running the beta version of the detonator drivers (version 12.9) as well as every other non-beta version before that. Thanks for the info. though.

[Werewolfdaddy]

I am only asking for reference; did you uninstall the original drivers for the gts? Sometimes, if you have two sets of video drivers, they will conflict.

As for asus, keep harassing them. Look for a tech support number to call and live on it. I did the same with Hp, when they sold me a crappy computer. What I bought was a 7850 pIII 933mhz, what I own now is a P4 1.7gig that is worth over double the original purchase price.
When you downloaded the drivers, did you use download accelerater? Nvidia support recommends turning it off for downloading drivers.

[tvpincdoc]

Thanks for the interest. You had good suggestions, but unfortunately I had already installed the original drivers, uninstalled them then installed all of the updates from 12.6 through 12.9 (the beta). I had read on the site not to use a download accelerator (I don't have on anyway) and that the old drivers had to be removed first, so that shouldn't be the issue.
I think that you are right. Certain companies need more prodding. I previously purchased from Creative, and I have found that they seem to respond promptly and courteously-perhaps I'm just spoiled. Same for Western Digital-they always got back to me quickly whenever I had a glitch.
I'll keep trying. Hopefully, someone else here has had a similar problem with OpenGL performance suffering while everything else flies. Perhaps I'll get an answer here while the engineers at ASUS ignore me/don't know the answer.