vGuru?
vGuruABIT's vGuru purports to offer better graphics hardware monitoring and tweaking than ever before.
Here's what we see when the vGuru application is first launched.
Clicking on either the core or memory frequency opens up a control panel on the left-hand side. Core frequency can be pushed up to an improbable 800MHz, whilst RAM can be set as high as 1960MHz. Just don't expect the card to function at those frequencies, though!
A click on the core temperature button allows you to set an alarm or switch the system off if the core breaches a preset temperature. Our advice would be to set this quite high, as ATI's cores, coupled with a hot summer, tend to push load temperatures towards the 80C mark.
Core voltage warning values can be changed by dragging the right-hand bar either up or down. The actual value can only be increased by 0.1v, up to 1.4v, though. ABIT is playing the voltage game on the cautious side.
Again, warning values can be set by moving the slider up or down. In relation to card RAM the 1.97v default voltage can be raised to 2.1v. Every little helps in the quest for greater overclocking, we guess.
FanEQ is feature that is common on recent ABIT motherboards, and it's a pretty handy one. Fan speed is dynamically changed in relation to core temperature, and you can obviously set the temperatures at which the fan will run at slow, medium and high speeds.
What's interesting to note is that ABIT bumps up the core voltage to 1.35v when the card is set to XTurbo mode that raises the card's frequencies to 419MHz core and around 1100MHz RAM (effective). We'd suspect that it's ABIT covering itself, just in case a few poor cores don't quite run at 420MHz at the default 1.3v.
We've often lamented how reference cards are boring in nature. ABIT has added in a custom PCB design, custom cooler, and, best of all, decent tweaking options on its Fatal1ty X800 XL 512MB card. Kudos for being different. vGuru is also compatible with ABIT's Guru Clock, a feature on Fatal1ty motherboards that allows you to monitor and control frequencies and voltages from a separate display.
