How do you like your card Sir ?

Most cards run either stock aka reference clocks or are preoverclocked out of the box. Having a preset for 2D clocks and one setting for 3D action. The Asus engineers have gone that tiny bit further by presetting 4 modes. These modes can be selected either via the Itracker 2 software or by using one of the attributed short keys.

Since this card was build to perform I found it very strange that their were several presets available, but for the environmental guys I can understand that there's no need for a GPU to run full blast when just browsing or listening to music. Question remains who will switch between all these modes? Or eg won't some users forget to select e.g. Game mode when entering the online battlefield... and not enjoy their videocard's potential to the fullest...

Anyway here's a short oversight of the different preset modes :

Gaming and Optimized mode :


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As you can see Asus didn't make any changes in the 3d section, both settings run the card slightly pre overclocked over the reference clock speeds of 648GPU and 1476 shader speed. Ram speeds are in line with the reference vanilla cards at 2484Mhz. Optimized and gaming mode only differ in the 2D mode, whereas gaming mode steps down only a few Mhz, gaming mode clocks down into the Eco direction.

2 more presets to go ; Default mode and Power Saving mode


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Both modes run in 3D the same clockspeeds at the 2D Gaming mode, yet again differences lie in the 2d mode, where Power Saving Mode clocks down in 2D as the optimized mode preset. Default mode 2D is a bit of an in-between...

What this will do for your wallet will be found out a bit later as we measure the differences in /idle load between these modes. Under load we don't expect much as it are only a few Mhz differences, though under 2D it can become more apparent.

RAMTWEAKING VIA iTRACKER2

As you noticed this video card also allows tweaking of the onboard ram, the presets are the following :

Performance, Default and OCing mode.


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As you see there aren't any big changes between these 3 options. But I still opted to test each preset to see how big of an influence they have on the 3 tested games and the infamous 3DMark. I included the default and performance setting in the graphs. I ditched OC mode as it relaxed the timings and didn't give me any extra ram overclocking headroom. I rather went for some tweaks myself, though I'm not really used to tweak Video card rams...





For daily users not much to see here... for the overclockers a few hundred extra points left or right is always welcome...

FAN SPEED CONTROL

The fan speed control couldn't be more exuberant than this. Either you opt for the default or AUTO setting so fan RPM is derived by the GPU temp (preset by the bios engineers). Or you take control of your own and select a certain fixed value. For the 3rd option you opt to change the AUTO preset by putting in temperature values of your own, linking them to a certain fan speed.


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MONITORING

Like with it's high End motherboards, Asus allows via the monitoring tool to read out GPU, RAM, PWM and PCB temps. It can monitor all major voltages; sadly it only shows 3 readouts at a time...


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Pretty hard to make your choice there, isn't it :)

CREATING and BURNING YA OWN SETTINGS

All of this is nice, but how do I save a setting of my own ? Well they couldn't have made it any easier, forget about software presets. Asus allows you to create 4 setups for your own specific needs and burn it straight to the videocard's bios.

So you can create 4 more presets on top of the 4 factory ones. In this example I called it “daily clocks" as I could run them speeds without any significant voltage increase ! I also opted to try a different pattern for the Fan control and then tried to burn it to the Vbios.


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Next step : Click on the tiny video card above the burn the mode setting, and you will see this window appear :


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If something should go wrong, it clearly lists how to recover from the bad settings... I tried it and it worked first hand!

And finally the necessary reboot sign:


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I quickly opened the Precision tool to cross check the applied speeds before rebooting. After the reboot all the GPU settings were correctly applied, but the fan speed setting was still at AUTO and not at my preset values. The same default to AUTO happens when you are testing some settings and close the Itracker2 software. The videocard's fan always defaulted to AUTO setting with the current version. No matter what I burned, after each reboot it was AUTO set again. I even downloaded the newer 2.11 version , same issue remains...

Really hope the Asus engineers can work out the few bugs within this OC tool, as it's a very nice and good design...