There's something about flashing lights and LED displays that seems to appeal to the male psyche. Witness all the toys that males generally make a beeline for fast cars, electronic devices and expensive home theater systems. It is this group of enthusiasts that ASUS hopes to capture with its latest product. Since most enthusiasts who overclock or heavily tweak their systems desire instant access to information like temperature and fan speed, ASUS has followed the trend of some manufacturers by including these in a separate display module that can be mounted in the 5.25-inch drive bay of the chassis. Such an approach has been done previously with both liquid and air cooled setups. - Hardware Zone

ASUS Extreme N8600 GT OC Gear Graphics Review

Based on the mid-range NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT, this ASUS card is modest in length and height. The fan however is a two-slot version that will take up an extra expansion slot. It is rather quiet with a low, faint hum when running and that too at its maximum speed. Like other GeForce 8600 GT cards, no power connector is needed as the card takes all it requires through the PCI Express bus. The clock and memory speeds are at the standard frequencies of 540MHz and 1400MHz respectively. However, we got slightly higher numbers than expected in our benchmarks and a check of its BIOS revealed that the 32 stream processors are running at 1296MHz, roughly 100MHz higher than usual.

As for the OC Gear module, it fits snugly into any 5.25-inch drive bay on the chassis and screws are required to mount it securely. A spare 4-pin USB header on the motherboard is required for it to work as a connecting cable is provided to connect the module to the motherboard. It is through this avenue that the OC Gear gets its power and real time system information. Users can even adjust how often they want the module to poll the system for information like temperature and frame rate through the included SmartDoc utility. Extra drivers are needed for this module and supporting tools like SmartDoc and GamerOSD.

The point of the OC Gear module is to make overclocking as simple as twisting a knob, but that's limited only to the GPU core unfortunately. But that aside, how far can this ASUS card really go? Despite the 700MHz upper limit that we found on the ASUS SmartDoc application, we couldn't get the card to complete bechmarking at any core clock above 680MHz. The memory chips were also limited to 1560MHz effective. Overall, the ASUS OC Gear was quite decent for overclocking, finishing behind the outstanding XFX Fatal1ty. It was also an improvement compared to the original clocks of the OC Gear version.

With its OC Gear module, ASUS has probably taken the next step towards making overclocking graphics cards even more accessible to users. To be fair, it has been anything but challenging for a while now, as manufacturers have been very accommodating when it comes to this, from offering products that are overclocked out of the box to custom cooling solutions to enhance overclocking and numerous novice friendly software tools that ramp up the clock speeds with the click of a button. ASUS' OC Gear module now brings the overclocking from the usual software based tweaking to simply turning a knob.

Finally, like any new innovative feature offered by vendors, expect to pay a premium for this product. At the time of publishing, the card's price is still not known but coming from ASUS, which is known more for its quality than bargains, the final retail price for this OC Gear edition will definitely be more than the usual GeForce 8600 GT. While the actual value the OC Gear module offers to consumers when it comes to tweaks and overclocking may not be significant, especially to experienced users, it does add to the whole modding experience and of course the bling effect.