ASUS GeForce GTX 780 DirectCU II OC review - Article

GeForce GTX 780 3GB DirectCU II OC - ASUS Doin' da Cool Tech

ASUS this week released the ASUS GTX780-DC2OC-3GD5 aka the GeForce GTX 780 3GB DirectCU II OC from ASUS. The product comes with new DirectCU II & CoolTech Fan technology and a DIGI+ VRM with 10-phase Super Alloy technology. Well, in short, own design PCB, improved dual-slot cooling and a factory overclock. Now who doesn't like that with a card based on the chip that is embedded in the GeForce GTX titan eh ?

The GeForce GTX 780 is NVIDIAs all new high-end graphics card based in their Flagship product, the GTX Titan. This means it is based on the GK110 GPU and has an whopping 7.1 Billion transistors. That makes it a nice chunk faster opposed to the GeForce GTX 680 GPU. We test the product with the hottest games like Metro: Last light, Battlefield 3, Sleeping Dogs, Far Cry 3, Medal of Honor Warfighter, Hitman Absolution and many more.

Just like Titan, the GTX 780 is based on the GK110 GPU with the distinctions that the Titan has a GK110-300 GPU and the GeForce GTX 780 a GK110-400 GPU. Same stuff, yet with some things disabled. But we are a bit surprized to see NVIDIA move forward with GK110, See, the GK110 chip is BIG, and that makes it a difficult chip to bake, its recipe is refined though as the product has 2304 Shader Processing Units, 192 TMUs and 32 ROPs on a 384-bit memory interface of fast GDDR5. So yeah, NVIDIA trimmed down that that 45 mm × 45 mm 2397-pin S-FCBGA Titian with its 2688 shader/stream/CUDA processors a bit.

Memory wise you are looking at 3GB over 6 GB, that is still huge (12 pieces of 64M ×16 GDDR5 SDRAM) of memory (384-bit) on there and started designing a bunch of new tricks at BIOS and driver level. Combined with GPU Boost 2.0 you will see this product boosting towards the 1100~1150 MHz range once you tweak it. The reference clock is 863 MHz with a boost clock of 900 MHz. Looking at the specs you must think that this product must consume heaps of power, well it's not great, but definitely not bad at all. The maximum allowed board design power draw is roughly 250 Watt, which considering what this product is, is good.

But let's say hello to Titan's little brother first, the GeForce GTX 780 from ASUS, in a DirectCU II OC flavah-flaf. This is the 3GB DirectCU II & CoolTech Fan edition that comes factory clocked for you at 889 MHz (Ref 863) with a Boost clock of 941 MHz (Ref 900). However, ASUS increased the power limits a little as it seems, as the during monitoring the card ran steady at 1058 MHz.

But have a peek at the product we test today and then head onwards into to review.