Bundle/Overclocking

Smart Doctor

One of the few things that set the Asus card apart from the pack is the inclusion of ASUS' onboard thermal monitoring system, Smart Doctor. Asus is one of the few companies offering such protection. The utility informs you of such aspects as fan speed, RAM and core temperature, and core voltage. So should your card have a total meltdown, you will be able to see it in all its glory, watching the red bars go through the roof, and then pitch black. No, not really, Smart Doctor does a bit more than just tell you that something bad will happen, it actually stops those bad things from happening. Should the fan on your video card become clogged with some huge hairball, Smart Doctor will realize that something is out of wack, and will compensate accordingly. This gets a nod in our book. (Smart Doctor saved my GeForce DDR card -- Ed)

Smart Doctor

Tweak Utility

The Asus card also comes with its own tweak utility. It's really nothing more than the usual overclocking features that you can unlock in the NVIDIA driver set, but we're not complaining, enabling the overclocking features on reference NVIDIA drivers are getting to be more of a chore now. With these, you just install them - we like.

Tweak Utility

The Drivers

Trying to top NVIDIA in the driver-making field is pretty much a waste of time; they made the chipset; they obviously know what they are doing. As a result, card manufacturers simply throw their name in place of the NVIDIA logo and send the driver set on its way. The ASUS driver set is really no different, aside from the addition of a few minor tweaks; there aren't any major differences.

Overclocking

We don't judge a card by its overclocking results, namely because everybody has different experiences. Having said that, the Asus card we tested was just pitiful when we tried to overclock. We ended up pushing the core and memory up by a handful of MHz, possibly 4 or 5 MHz. I think people have overclocked calculators by more.

We doubt the problem was cooling related, as we tried to overclock with the normal setup, and then with a nice big fan blowing directly at the card. The results pretty much stayed the same. We weren't surprised that the RAM didn't overclock by much, as the RAM on a GeForce3 is already running darn quick, at 3.8ns to be exact. To keep things in perspective, the RAM on your motherboard is somewhere in the region from 6-10ns.