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Asus EN8600GT OC Gear
Sudeep Naik, Aug 31, 2007 1135 hrs ISTOverclocking was supposed to be a geek thing. Here's one from Asus that makes it child's play, or does it?
Build, HSF, OC Gear looks cool, Performance, Good overclocker.
Dual slot, OC Gear has no practical use, Expensive.
Expert Rating :
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The OC gear is an external hardware module that allows you to adjust the GPU clock, system volume, and fan speed. It also shows the current GPU core temperature and the FPS when playing a game.
The OC gear can be placed in an optical drive slot in the cabinet. It has a black mirror on the front, and a knob that also doubles up as a push button to select a variable to be changed. The knob is used to change various settings mentioned above. There are LED indicators for system volume, GPU clock, temperature, FPS, and fan speed.
It draws power from a USB header on the motherboard. Now, there are a few things that come up here. First, since the OC Gear is not directly connected to the card, it requires other software (Asus SmartDoctor) to control the variables of the graphic card. Second, the OC gear can be used on other current and future ASUS graphic cards as well. Finally, it turns on only when you start the Asus SmartDoctor software.
I'd like to talk more about the display on the OC Gear. As aforementioned, it allows you to adjust the GPU clock speed, and the numeric value for the GPU speed is shown in the Asus SmartDoctor window (in the form of a slider). Now, incase you want to change the clock speed in the middle of the game, you'll either have to Alt + Tab across windows, or just exit the game (as some games don't support Alt + Tab-ing). Also, OC Gear cannot alter the memory clocks; again, it requires the use of the Asus SmartDoctor.
And since I am supposed to use the software to make such changes, I might as well get rid of the OC Gear hardware module.
All said and done, although it looks really cool the way it is, the OC Gear would have earned more brownie points for Asus if it could edit and display some numeric data like CPU and memory clocks, temperature, etc., rather than eye candy stuff like 'FPS' and system volume.
Asus EN8600GT also comes bundled with Asus SmartDoctor that is used to view/change GPU clock speeds. It also shows the current memory clock speed, GPU and memory temperature and the fan speed.
The GamerOSD application (also bundled)lets you record in-game movies and take screenshots as well. It also allows you to view them on your PC or broadcast over a network. But when I tried recording in-game movies, the games lagged a lot. Maybe Fraps still is a good choice.
That said; let's proceed to see what that Asus EN8600GT has to offer.
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