Bundled Software
The Asus Smart Doctor software is fully compatible with the ATi reference drivers, so there is no need to wait for the official Asus releases every time a new catalyst comes out. Note that the Asus 9800XT does NOT support the Ati overdrive feature of the reference 9800XT, I asked Holger Schmidt, the Asus European PR Manager.
“The ATI overdrive doesn’t work because we didn’t follow the ATI reference design. In order to measure and show the exact voltages, temperatures and rotation speed we had to integrate a different kind of sensor method. ATi’s Overdrive + VGuard functionality is basically just testing whether the chipset is doing wrong calculations or not. Furthermore averagely 7 MHz Overdrive overclocking cannot be called huge bargain :-) and manual overclocking is still the best choice”
I am inclined to agree, as the information provided by the SmartDoctor is very useful – and more useful than the nominal increase Overdrive causes after a few hours.
The top section shows VCC, Vcore, AGP voltage and the FB Voltage. These voltages should be supplied steadily by the motherboard, or the system will crash. If you see wide fluctuations and your system is unstable, this will pinpoint that problem
The middle section shows the temperatures of the memory and the GPU. Temperatures will inevitably be considerably higher than what you normally consider to be acceptable, but graphics cards are designed to run at much higher temperatures than CPUs. Whilst around 55 degrees is the upper limit for a CPUs stable limit, its not unusual to see VGA cards rise to 80-90 degrees C.
The bottom section shows the fans RPM speed. The speed at which this fan speed rotates at can be manually set in the smart doctors setup section. Notice for this screenshot I have increased the Engine and Memory to their maximum levels allowed by this software.
As you can see you can set it for maximum performance at low temperatures or for minimum noise levels and everything in between. If you do not understand these settings my advice would be to not play with them, at default settings the Asus cooler is quiet and unobtrusive.
Asus VideoSecurity is a very useful utility that detects any change in a specified surveillance region. Using video capture from either S-Video or composite sources, this program will alert you with an audible alarm and popup each time something interrupts the picture. Another option is for the Asus program to telephone you (using a voice modem) or email you should an intruder be detected, a very useful addition if you want to use the software to monitor somewhere more remote than your own PC. This would be very useful for a low cost home security system. A limitation that might be useful would be compatibility with webcams, as this would make it even cheaper, especially with the quality of some newer cams being so good. All of the sensitivity options can be tweaked so that the quality of your hardware will not cause too many false positives.
Asus Gameface is similar in theory to Microsoft’s game voice technology. Where as the later allows you to talk to your opponents during online games, the Asus utility lets you see your opponents face during full screen OpenGL or Direct 3D games. Note that you must install the specially adapted Asus versions of the catalyst drivers to make this work. This adds an “OSD” tab in the advanced display properties where you can enable OSD features and assign hot keys. Fortunately webcams are compatible with this piece of software, although you can still use the Rage Theatre video capture chip if you prefer via the cards VIVO option. Once you have assigned your hotkey, set your desired opacity of the window, simply start the game and press the hotkey to start video.
No, this is not in fact my face, since the print screen key cannot capture video, so I have pasted in someone infinitely more attractive so you get the right effect ;)
The final bundled piece of software on the Asus disk is Digital VCR, something that lets you digitally record any source from the card’s VIVO capability. It lets you capture at several quality settings and you can even set scheduled recording times when you want it to start, just like a traditional VCR player. Like ATi’s media centre you can set your Windows wallpaper as the picture, and also take snapshots of video.
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