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One of the extra points with ASUS is in the fact they make their own software and supply modded drivers with quite significant extras. • ASUS GameFace Live
for real-time video/audio communication. I ran into a quite significant problem in testing, that being one which other sites have reported, a blue screen of death when installing the very important ASUS Smartdoctor.
Not wanting to publish this review without a "working" smartdoctor I went into discussions with ASUS engineers who resolved this issue with a test bios update for me to play with, after flashing in DOS I was pleased to see Smartdoctor working again. This might be a concern to some of you reading this or contemplating a purchase of one of these boards, as they have already made it into stores such as overclockers.co.uk with the older incompatible bios, hopefully by the time this review has hit publication the bios will be readily available for download from the ASUS support site. Generally my dealngs with ASUS have been first class, they seem very interested in getting drivers and updates out the door as fast as possible. This is also mirrored in the fact that last week ASUS released their 8.05 driver to the public (4.9 catalyst), granted its not the newest 8.07 beta which ATI offically released but its quite up to date. I also asked ASUS about their 8.07 driver, as I wanted to review this board with the best and fastest ATI driver released to this point, they informed me the driver was still in development, so I decided to mod my own. On a final note for those reading this who have just bought a AX800XT PCIe card and are stuck in a vicious blue screen of death reboot cycle, press F8 on powering up and boot into safe mode, go into C drive (or whichever is your OS drive), go into program files and drag out the ASUS folder to your desktop. Reboot back into windows (this stops the software from automatically loading), move the ASUS folder back into programs, then deinstall the application with the smartdoctor setup. If you dont move the ASUS folder back into programs the installer will think the ASUS suite is not installed and will Reinstall again!
Getting my home made modded 8.07 beta to work with smartdoctor and the asus enhanced driver panels didnt require much work just a few tricks. As you can see below, smartdoctor allows for very tight control over temperatures and fan variables and once I applied the bios upgrade from ASUS engineers it worked flawlessy. Id like to thank Jack Cheng in ASUS for his work with me and getting this annoying issue resolved.
The main Smartdoctor monitoring program is a great application as you can not only monitor core temperatures like ATIs own overdrive, but you can monitor ram temperatures as well.
The images above show the main functionality of Smartdoctor monitoring, everything from core and ram temperatures to variable fan speeds as well as voltages. Smartdoctor (above, bottom right) only allows a maximum overclock to 515 core and 1040ram (from the default figures of 500 core and 500/1000), these are figures ASUS claim to be safe overclocks. Ill be using ATI tool later to achieve higher overclocks, but all in all its a nice package and a sure fit hit for the more novice users who dont fancy pushing things too hard. My test system for this is as follows: Intel P4 3.4ghz Extreme Edition The test setup had a fresh windows XP professional SP2 with all updates, all tests were ran 3 times to ensure no abnormalities could creep into the end results. Fraps2 was used in conjunction with custom built time demos as to replicate real world gaming conditions rather than a totally synthetic environment.
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