ASUS AI Suite 19 percent faster) TESTED VERSION, 1.03.15. CONFIGURATION: Intel Core 2 Duo E6700, Asus Maximus (Intel X381. 2 GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS PCMARK VANTAGE: 4,030 points (earlier: 3,697) AI Suite combines multiple tuning programs that can overclock the CPU or the entire system, and can even control the fans. It comes with all the latest Asus motherboards and can also be downloaded from.

The biggest strength of AI Suite is its easy operation. You can access the tools AI Gear 3, AI Booster, CPU Level Up and O-Fan using the group of buttons on the left side of the main program interface. AI Gear 3 is especially useful. Here, the system can be switched between the power-saving" Pedestrian" mode (which uses 1 0 percent less power) and the fast "Rocket" mode (which uses 5 percent more power) using a virtual on-screen gear shift. Apparently, an airplane is the standard mode of transport in Taiwan, since the default settings of the system (neither underclocked nor overclocked) are called "Airplane" mode. The "Magic Wand" setting is better than manual switching: Here, the system changes the mode automatically depending on CPU load. The 5 percent increase in power consumption in "Rocket" mode reveals what AI Gear 3 really does: dynamically adapting the CPU speed.

On the other hand, CPU Level Up can unleash some real power: Here, you can select the speeds of the "processor" you want to use from a menu - the system independently adjusts all settings of your actual CPU to match. In our case, we
could choose to run our Core 2 Duo E6700 at the speed of a Core 2 Extreme X6800 or a Core 2 Duo E6850! After restarting, the system ran stably at the 3.0 GHz speed of the E6850 - this brought PCMark Vantage from 3.697 to 4.030 points: An improvement of 9 percent. However, avoid the "Crazy" option. Our test system did not even boot after applying this, since the CPU parameters were set too high. Last
of all, if the PC is running fast and stable, activate 0 Fan, so that the fan does not constantly drone at its full rotating speed.