ASUS EN8800GS TOP: price vs. speed
ASUS' proprietary utilities
ASUS EN8800GS TOP comes bundled with the three utilities:
- ASUS Gamer OSD;
- ASUS Smart Doctor;
- ASUS VIDEO SECURITY online.
Let's take a closer look at the first two because they may prove really useful.
ASUS Gamer OSD
The ASUS Gamer OSD utility has been shipped with ASUS with video cards for several years and has acquired numerous features for all this time. It has acquired the skill of making screen-shots in games, recording video or broadcast it in real time over the Internet, as well as overclocking the video processor and displaying the FPS value. But - all in good time.
The main window of the program allows selecting the video capture mode, reassigning the key combinations to invoke the dialog window during the game, recording video or taking a screenshot, as well as watching the recorded video or the screenshot taken. We now move on to the advanced video settings which are adjustable through pressing the button in the «Video capture mode» item.
The video settings dialog windows allows:
- selecting the sizes of video capture - 320x240, 640x480, and 720x480;
- selecting the FPS within 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30;
- choosing the video format; in our case, we had the two codecs – XviD MPEG-4 and WMV.
The first tab of the dialog "windows" invoked while in a game (or any other 3D application) allows:
- adjusting the brightness, contrast and hue of the image;
- enabling/disabling the FPS display, as well as choosing its color;
- adjusting the GPU clock speed of the video card.
The second tab deals with video capture.
The third tab deals with taking screenshots.
Just admit it - the utility may prove really useful, for example, if the game is dark and its settings are insufficient to get acceptable image brightness. Now let's take a closer look at another utility by ASUS.
ASUS Smart Doctor
ASUS Smart Doctor allows overclocking the video card, monitoring its temperature, rotational speed of the fan, voltages, frequencies, etc. See for yourselves:
The main tab of the program allows adjusting the video card's frequencies, with the clock speeds of the core and the shader unit adjustable separately. The program also monitors its heating. The other two tabs to do with the fan and the supply voltage were inactive in our case. That is caused by the fact that ASUS EN8800GS TOP lacks matching hardware utilities. Now, the program settings.
In the "Monitor" tab, you can set the limit temperature for the GPU, on exceeding which the program starts alarming. For some unknown reasons, the program did not beep and confined to only the visual indications, although the related utility ASUS PC Probe 2 for motherboards can do that.
In the "Fan management" tab, we could assign rules for the fan operation depending on the GPU heating, or set a fixed and auto speed. But the video card in question can't manage the fan, so this tab proved useless to us.
Finally, the Information tab where we can read some settings of the video card. In our case, it is the name of the GPU – «D8P» (why not G92?), its revision, the capacity of the video memory, information on the video BIOS version, and the number of active universal processors.
Finishing our introduction to ASUS Smart Doctor, we note that at its functionality it is hardly inferior to the famous Riva Tuner.
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