Overclocking and Noise
Overclocking
With many a post on an internet forum about retail X800 PROs hitting higher than 550/1100 using default cooling, I had high hopes for the ASUS review sample. It was a slight disappointment to see it do the following.
As you can see, it was enough for a trouble free 3DMark03 score of 10693 and the card even went a little higher for some other tests (UT2003 in particular, running our custom test at 546/1090), but 525/1050 seemed to be the limit for all tests to run without issue.
Not bad but not the brilliant overclocks that some are getting with their retail boards.
Noise
Before I opened the box I was praying that SmartDoctor, ASUS's in-house utility for monitoring fan speeds, temperatures and card voltages, would support the AX800PRO/TD/P. I use SmartDoctor with my ASUS 9800 XT and it's a godsend, slowing down the fans on the board to barely audible levels, while allowing me to crank them back up when gaming.However the AX800PRO doesn't have support, most likely down to the reference cooler choice, ASUS not able to put the requisite hardware support on the board so that SmartDoctor could manage the card.
Saying that, fan speed and fan noise generally aren't an issue with the AX800PRO, the reference heatsink itself doing some limited fan speed adjustment based on temperature. It's not silent, but neither is it annoyingly noisy. A middling aural profile and nothing that will overly trouble anyone, except those in pursuit of absolute silence.
