ASUS GeForce GTX 780 DirectCU II Review & Gaming Benchmarks

Special Features

In todays ever growing “monkey see monkey do” market, it’s hard to find products that break the mold and nowadays the feature set of any said product is what differentiates it from the rest of the ramble. We’ll first off let us start at the PCB level where ASUS has designed the card to be a totally non-reference model. Their DirectCU II cooling is one of the best solutions you can get without going liquid cooling for your card. CU is the periodic table of elements sign for copper and the copper is then directly in contact with the GPU allowing much better heat dissipation and a card that can run at boost speeds other would just burn up at.

The custom cooling allows the card to run at about 30% cooler than a reference based model. How is this done? ASUS uses an exclusive DirectCU II thermal design includes a direct-GPU contact 10mm copper heatpipe and 220% larger dissipation area to boost heat removal efficiency. It performs 30% cooler and 3X quieter than reference due to these features. This helps tremendously with Boost 2.0 from NVIDIA as it allows the card to achieve excellent clock boosts without becoming unstable due to an over excess of heat. In essence the cooling is one of thee most important aspects of a video card and the DCII is known to perform.

I mentioned before that the card has 2 different fans on it and these are the CoolTech fans. These are a Proprietary design of ASUS and the CoolTech fan consists of a hybrid blade and bearing design, with inner radial blower and outer flower-type blades. These provide multi-directional airflow to accelerate heat removal and enable highly stable graphics performance.

Since the card has all this cooling technology it only makes sense that ASUS has the card overclocked right out of the box. The standard base clock of a reference GTX780 is 863MHz; the DCII comes clocked at 941MHz and has plenty of headroom for additional clock increases that translates into very good Boost 2.0 results that we will talk about later.

Digi+VRM is another major feature unique to the ASUS line of VGA products and this helps keep the card running at a constant temp and allows much better power efficiency. ASUS’s acclaimed DIGI+ VRM has been applied via a 10-phase power design that uses digital voltage regulators to minimize power noise by 30%, enhance power efficiency by 15%, widen voltage modulation tolerance, and improve overall stability and longevity by 2.5 times over reference. These features are considered under the hood, as you cannot physically see what they are doing, but they are doing it nonetheless. You can easily push this card far beyond what a reference card could achieve.

GPU Tweak is a software GUI that allows a user to completely control their cards various parameters. Things like clock and fan speeds and voltage and memory can all be controlled on the fly with the GPU Teak GUI. You can clearly monitor all of your temperatures and other setting live in the Windows environment.

All of these special features help set ASUS apart from the rabble as like I stated previously that is what really separates products in today’s market. With high quality components and a solid set of special features ASUS wants your attention and your money, but the thing is they are making graphics cards that already have the attention of most enthusiasts due their exceptional attention to detail.

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