Final words and conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

ASUS does what it can do best, and that is supplying the GTX 760 in a small package. The DirectCU Mini cooling delivers fairly decent cooling temperatures whilst noise factor is kept at acceptable levels. The release of the GeForce GTX 760 really isn't something new in terms of technology. The GeForce GTX 760 is a GTX 680 GPU with two out of the 8 available shader processor clusters disabled. And from that point of view the release really is more of the same. The interesting thing however is that NVIDIA opened up this level of performance in a 'somewhat' mainstream performance segment. But at 219 EUR / 249 USD the performance you gain from a product like this is really interesting. Traditionally a GeForce GTX 460/560/660 and now 760 series product is upper segment of mainstream and as this product shows us, it'll eat any game for breakfast and then for lunch and dinner as well. For the reference clocked products, you may expect slightly lower than GTX 670 performance. But with all board partner 'tweaked' products, add another 10% to the performance and all of the sudden these puppies sit in between the GTX 670 and 680 performance wise. The board partners have gone crazy and jumped all over the GeForce GTX 760 with multiple versions and custom cooled solutions.

Performance

With the reference cards having a base-clock at 980 MHz, being factory clocked to 1006 MHz boosting to 1058 MHz. The magic is to be found in the boost clock as at that factory tweak the GPU all of the sudden finds its turbo frequency close to the 1100 MHz marker (when the power signature allows it to do so). But mostly that is what we noticed, that the GPU is continuously hovering in the 1100 MHz range during gaming. I'm still taking reference here okay ? Now a card like shown today with its factory tweak, well let me just say that it is absolutely golden for the guys and girls with a  1920x1080 and 1920x1200 range in monitor resolution, there's not a game out there that it can't deal with at this resolution. In Crysis 3 we end at an average of 41 FPS in 1920x1200 with Very High quality settings and that high resolution texture package and FXAA. Battlefield 3 is another example, with all eye candy opened up in game and again at 4xAA the card still pushes 56 FPS at 19x12 and that nearly equal to the GeForce GTX 680. So while this product might have two shader clusters less, the performance really remains exceptionally good and once the dynamic clock aka turbo kicks in.

Aesthetics

Being on a small form factor does come with one compromise: the cooler looks a little odd. The 17cm design is resulting in the fact that ASUS is using their own design PCB combined with DCU Mini cooler. Overall the design looks good with a nice black PCB, and the cooler is just icing on top of the cake, totally silent whilst keeping that GPU chilled down. The only thing they should change is pointing the peg connector to the back. A lot of multimedia cases don't allow that height.

Cooling

As you have been able to see in our test sessions, the cooler does its job well. The NVIDIA reference coolers are great, but they follow the temperature target of 80 degrees C. With the Direct CU Mini cooler however the GPU will get better cooling power at your disposal. As a result the temperature target might remain at roughly 70 degrees C. Now this is the highest recorded number based on our entire run of the software test suite. So we bench-marked all games and then noted down the hottest recorded temperature. 

Noise Levels

Directly related to the cooler are the noise levels.  The card remains fairly silent, you can hear airflow at 100% GPU load though, but nothing annoying at all. Next to that it just really offers good performance, under game load it stays at roughly 70 Degrees C (under the condition that you ventilate your PC properly). As stated noise wise there is little left to discuss as well, the cooler keeps the product fairly silent even under high gaming load.

Power Consumption

The GeForce GTX 760 edition as tested today shows roughly 160 Watt power consumption at peak utilization with a modern game. Honestly that is pretty good as well. Not far off from reference, of course. But remember the 760 is injected in the graphics arena as a mid-range product, but comes with a high-end class GPU that has been limited a bit.

Overclocking & perf

Typically with all cards you'll reach 1250~1300 MHz on the boost clock, if you know what you are doing overclocking wise. However with the mini we could only achieve another 50 MHz on the base-clock. Not a lot, Boosted this carded reaches almost 1200 MHz and that was stable. If only we'd have a little more GPU voltage at our disposal, we'd pass 1250 MHz for sure. None the less, the overclock result of the ASUS card was a bit of a downer. Drivers wise we can't complain at all, we did not stumble into any issues. And with a single GPU there's no micro-stuttering (if that ever bothered you) and no multi-GPU driver issues to fight off. Performance wise really there's not one game that won't run seriously good at the very best image quality settings. 

Final Words

As much of a refresh as the GeForce GTX 760 really is, it is the end-result that counts. The product comes with a GTX 680 chip but was limited in performance by roughly 25% because of two disabled SMX clusters (each 192 Shaders processors). But with plenty of memory bandwidth and the ROP engine left in-tact the GeForce GTX 760 remains to be serious business. The reality remains that last year's most high-end GPU can now be bought at a much better price. ASUS was on a mission with this card, addressing high-end class graphics card performance for the small form factor PCs. It is a growing market and honestly it is surprising what kind of powerhouse PCs you can build in these small cases. If you stick to single GPU gaming, then such a build can be as impressive as a monster sized PC. Other than the weird small looks we have very little to complain about the GeForce GTX 760 Direct CU Mini from Asus, it is fast and reasonably silent at acceptable cooling levels. If mATX and Mini ITX is your thing you should seriously opt for a card like this. If you can spot it in etail you can be the happy owner of it for roughly 219 EUR. For any games on Mini-ITX or small form factor requiring card that can handle FullHD gaming, well this is pretty much the best card available. Based on its purpose and small 17cm form factor, we can very much recommend it as it offers great performance for the money.

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