ASUS V7700 Deluxe 32MB GeForce2 GTS

The Drivers

The ASUS "Smart Doctor" utility allowed us to monitor several parameters, such as fan RPM's and temperature of the core, information that is provided by the Winbond chip. This utility reports the exact fan rotation speed of the fan, and lets you know if something is abnormal, a good tool for trouble-shooting and overclocking. Our second helper is the "AGP Power Level Monitoring." This feature will lower the voltage current (VIO and VCORE) to your card via the AGP bus when the power is not needed as much, thus resulting in a longer lifespan and a cooler card. Another interesting tool is the ASUS OverHeat Protection, which monitors the overall temperature of the card, and if the heat condition is close to a dangerous level, an automatic warning will kick in. Hopefully you can turn your system off in time and see what the problem is. This program runs in the background and does not take a noticeable amount of system resources, definitely a nice tool to have if you are planning to overclock. Speaking of overclocking, the next tool will really impress you. ASUS calls it "Dynamic OverClocking Technology" and it truly deserves that title. It lets you overclock in a dynamic way, as the actual overclocking occurs only when you start a 3D application, a game for example. The card will automatically clock down to its original state when your system is at idle. This is one step closer to a safer overclock, and this will hopefully reduce the number of "dead" cards due to one cause or another. We have found that this software lowers your card temperature at idle, but one problem is that sometimes it does not understand that you are running a non-3D intensive application, a word editor for example, and doesn't clock back. This happens rarely, but we congratulate ASUS on the overall software bundle. For more info see our V6800 review here.