Siluro Software

Software bundle

ABIT includes full versions of Accolade's Test Drive 5 and Shogo: Mobile Armor Division from Monolith Productions in the Siluro packaging. Since both games are a bit old (and hardly take advantage of the GeForce 2 GTS chip), we would have preferred ABIT skipped the game bundle entirely and passed the savings on to end users. Also included in the packaging is an S-Video cable, installation CD, and manual.

Speaking of the manual, the book included with the Siluro board is very impressive. Weighing in at 58 pages, the Siluro manual does an excellent job of walking you through the card installation as well as the features of the bundled drivers. Programs included on the installation CD are WinDVD 2000 (for watching DVD movies on your computer), Album View (for viewing images), and ABIT's Graphics Max utility for overclocking your video card.

ABIT's Graphics Max Utility

In terms of overclocking utilities, Graphics Max offers the same functionality as every other overclocking utility out there. Simple enable video card overclocking, reboot the system, and bam, you can overclock the graphics core and memory on the fly, without having to reboot after each adjustment.

Overclocking Utility

While Graphics Max gets the job done, it pales in comparison to AOpen's wonderful OpenGPU utility. Not only does OpenGPU offer clock speed adjustments, it also supports voltage adjustments of the core and memory. In addition, OpenGPU also offers full hardware monitoring support.

ASUS offers similar features with their excellent Smart Doctor utility. In addition to monitoring voltages, core temperature, and RPM speed, Smart Doctor can even dynamically overclock (or underclock) your video card based on activity. In any case, ABIT's Graphics Max utility is a nice utility, but isn't as feature-rich as some of the other implementations we've seen.

Likewise, the drivers included with the Siluro 256 GTS are pretty unremarkable. They're entirely based on NVIDIA's reference drivers (which is common practice with most video cards nowadays).

Graphics Drivers

More drivers

Yet more drivers