Verdict: A huge number of features, but it's a nightmare to configure

The original Digital Doc from Mac Power was one of the first system monitors to market, which naturally means that it has now been imitated more times than Elvis. Now the system monitor market has developed beyond the original Doc, which is now in its fifth revision.

Unfortunately, time hasn't been so kind to the Digital Doc. It's still by far and away the most feature-packed system monitor on the market, but by today's standards it's awkward and unintuitive to use, and lacks several crucial features. For example, it allows you to monitor the voltage and speed of up to eight fans (yes, count them, eight!), but doesn't allow you to change the speed of the fans. All you can do is switch them on or off, which is extremely crude and limiting, particularly if you're trying to reduce the noise of your system. It can also monitor up to eight separate temperature probes, each of which can have an alarm threshold set. Even more impressively, you can set the Digital Doc to start up additional back-up fans when the temperature breaches this threshold.

Unfortunately, setting all these features up requires a huge amount of patience and the thorough reading of a fairly meaty 23-page manual. This is a bit excessive, especially when you consider that none of the other system monitors requires you to read a manual at all. It also has a really annoying habit of cycling through all the fan and temperature readings when you're tying to configure a new setting for the first time.

As the Digital Doc 5 doesn't extend too far back, there's room enough for a hard disk and so Mac Power supplies a 40mm fan in the front panel to draw cool air over the drive. With its industrial looks the Digital Doc is pretty much the opposite of the Cooler Master Musketeer. However, it's available in black, silver or beige so it should be possible to match up to most cases. But its unfriendly menu design and lack of ability to control fan speeds means it no longer matches up to the meaner, leaner, younger crowd.

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