Smart Doctor

Hardware monitoring and OC slider at the bottom

VPU/RAM temp monitoring

Fan is cranked up now

One of the really cool features ASUS bundles with most of their high-end and mainstream graphics cards is their Smart Doctor utility. With Smart Doctor, you can monitor vital functions of your graphics card such as core/memory temperature and voltages, but Smart Doctor also goes well beyond providing hardware monitoring functionality. For instance, with Hyperdrive, Smart Doctor dynamically adjusts the clock speed of the graphics card, while Smart Doctor’s Smart Cooling feature can be used to automatically (or manually) adjust the speed of your card’s fan. And if a component were to begin to overheat or fail, Smart Doctor can automatically alert you of the problem and automatically lower the speed of your graphics card to protect it from getting damaged.

Overclocking with Smart Doctor

One of the really cool aspects of Smart Doctor is flexibility. If you’re the type of user who is experienced with overclocking and want to manually control everything, ASUS Smart Doctor provides manual control of the graphics core and its memory, just like a traditional overclocking utility such as Rage3D Tweak or Powerstrip. But, if the thought of leaving your card overclocked at all times concerns you, you can also set Smart Doctor to automatically adjust the speed of your graphics card based on one of three modes via HyperDrive: by temperature, by usage, or by CPU utilization.

Hyperdrive enabled

In temperature mode, Smart Doctor acts similarly to ATI’s OVERDRIVE feature in the sense that the card’s clock is adjusted based on its temperature. The higher the VPU’s temperature, the lower Smart Doctor will overclock the graphics core, or vice versa. Smart Doctor is a little more flexible than OVERDRIVE however as ASUS provides four different modes -- Slow, Medium, Fast, and Fastest. Medium is the default clock setting, while slowest and slow slightly underclock the graphics core. Finally, Fast and Fastest will overclock the card, the cooler the core operates, the higher the overclock.

Another mode ASUS provides with Smart Doctor’s HyperDrive is 3D mode. 3D Mode automatically adjusts the card’s speed based on usage. Once a 3D application is loaded, Smart Doctor will set your clocks to their highest allowed settings by Smart Doctor (in the case of the EAX600XT/HTVD, that would be 550MHz core/800MHz memory). Once you’re finished gaming, Smart Doctor will restore the card’s clocks to their default values. Note that this setting only works when you install the ASUS enhanced driver from the CD that ships with your EAX600XT/HTVD.

The final mode HyperDrive provides is CPU usage mode. In this mode Smart Doctor will increase your clocks when your CPU is busy. The higher the CPU loading, the higher Smart Doctor will set the card’s clocks. Once CPU utilization is reduced, Smart Doctor will reduce the VPU’s clocks.

You can adjust the alarm settings here

Dynamic or manual fan adjustment

Smart Doctor fan control

As we mentioned earlier, another feature Smart Doctor provides is fan control, this feature is known as Smart Cooling. Once again multiple options are available for the end user.

For instance, if you want to manually adjust your fan’s RPMs, you can do that via Smart Doctor’s slider. Simply drag the slider to the setting you want. By default, Smart Cooling sets the fan’s slider to 100%, so if you find the fan a little louder than your liking, just drag the slider until you find a noise level you’re comfortable with (fan speeds are adjustable in increments of 10%).

For added convenience, Smart Cooling can automatically adjust the RPMs of your card’s fan based on temperature. With auto fan control, RPMs will be adjusted based on predefined settings determined by ASUS, or if you’d like you can use Smart Cooling to set the temperature thresholds for each mode yourself.

Overclocking in action

We tried to use Smart Doctor to overclock the EAX600XT/HTVD card, but were unsuccessful in our attempts to adjust the card’s clock speeds. While the slider indicated a speed of 550 core/780MHz memory (the highest allowed manually by the slider) we noted no change in the card’s performance. Meanwhile, attempts to adjust the clock speeds of the card with traditional overclocking utilities resulted in corrupted video for even the tamest of overclocks. Hopefully ASUS can update Smart Doctor shortly to provide overclocking support for the EAX600XT/HTVD. And in case you were wondering, Smart Doctor can be used on top of ATI’s reference drivers.