Smart Doctor (cont’d)

Fan control

One other really cool feature Smart Doctor offers that no other ATI card can boast (with the exception of Tyan, who also offers hardware monitoring with their cards) is the ability to manually adjust the speed of the graphics cards fan(s). This makes the ASUS RADEON cards perfect for small form factor or near silent PCs, as you can manually lower the RPMs of the fan.

Enabling HyperDrive

Monitor menu

Fan control menu - manual mode

If you’d like, Smart Doctor can dynamically adjust the speed of the fan depending on the temperature of the graphics core, using presets that you determine. Once the graphics chip hits that temperature threshold you’ve set, Smart Doctor will automatically kick up the fan’s RPMs in an attempt to keep the temperature in balance. This feature is known as ASUS SmartCooling. As a result of this feature, your graphics card isn’t outputting more noise than it has to. ATI offers dynamic fan speeds on its RADEON 9800 XT card, but it’s completely invisible to the end user and is not controllable.

Fan control menu - SmartCooling enabled

GPU and RAM temps

Fan RPMs

HyperDrive/Overclocking

For those of you who would like to overclock your graphics card, ASUS gives you some pretty powerful options with Smart Doctor. For traditionalists, or those who like to control everything by hand, ASUS provides manual overclocking control. This comes in the form of a handy graphics slider for both the graphics core and memory.

If you refer to our screenshots, you’ll see the sliders at the bottom of Smart Doctor, in the “Graphics Speed” region of the utility. The top slider controls the clock speed of the graphics core. The number at the end of the slider is the clock speed of the graphics core. As you drag the slider, you’ll see the clock speed increase until you get to the very edge. ASUS currently caps the RADEON 9600 XT/TVD at 530MHz and the RADEON 9800 XT/TVD at 440MHz. These settings are 8MHz over ATI’s OVERDRIVE setting for the 9800 XT, and 3MHz over the 9600 XT OVERDRIVE setting ATI offers natively.

ASUS goes one step beyond however by offering clock speed adjustment of the card’s memory subsystem. Again, simply drag the slider to overclock the card’s memory. Smart Doctor tops out at 770MHz on the memory for the RADEON 9800 XT/TVD, and 650MHz for the RADEON 9600 XT/TVD. Hardcore overclockers may argue that these settings are a little conservative, but keep in mind that this is all offered in the packaging for both cards, so don’t expect ASUS to go too far with the settings. Basically, ASUS offers enough to get your feet wet, but hopefully not enough to do serious damage to your graphics card.

If you’d like Smart Doctor to handle overclocking dynamically, it can do that too thanks to HyperDrive. HyperDrive offers three modes: 3D game mode, CPU usage mode, and temperature mode.

In 3D mode, HyperDrive will automatically set the graphics processor and memory to the highest setting available while you’re playing 3D games. Once you’re finished playing, HyperDrive will restore the clock speeds to their default values. This ensures the highest performance when gaming, while providing the ultimate reliability when you’re not. This mode does require that the ASUS enhanced driver is installed, something we didn’t do as we wanted to use CATALYST 3.10 for our testing (ASUS’ latest official driver is based on CATALYST 3.9).

CPU usage mode monitors processor utilization to determine when to crank up the clocks. As processor utilization cranks up, so do the graphics clock speeds. Once CPU utilization is reduced, ASUS Smart Doctor will reduce the graphics card’s clocks. This ensures optimum efficiency.

The final mode is temperature mode. If this setting is enabled, Smart Doctor will dynamically adjust the speed of the graphics core based on temperature, just like ATI’s OVERDRIVE feature. ASUS differs from ATI in that they offer four different settings, ATI OVERDRIVE just offers two.

Smart Doctor can work on top of ATI’s reference drivers (the method we used for testing) or in addition to ASUS’ enhanced driver, which, as we just mentioned, toggles more Smart Doctor functionality as well as ASUS GameFace.