ASUS GTX780Ti DirectCU II OC Review

ASUS GTX780Ti DirectCU II OC Review

Conclusion

As we said in our introduction, the combination of things here is such that you almost know exactly what you’re getting without having to plough through our results. 

However, the DCUII OC isn’t quite all we hoped it would be. Don’t get us wrong, it would be impossible to have a disappointing GTX780Ti, such is the extraordinary performance available and the ASUS card is no different. Perhaps it’s our expectations from ASUS and their excellent DirectCU II cooler but it’s very difficult to come away from our results with anything other than a bit of a quiet “oh”.

Stock performance is good despite the relatively low clock speed that the ASUS card comes equipped with. Although it’s 80MHz ahead of the pure reference speed, and therefore deserving of the OC suffix, it’s a good 50 or 60MHz behind the speeds available on other factory overclocks. It’s about the same as most of the other GTX780Ti’s we’ve tested, although the massive overclock of the Gigabyte GHz Edition is easily the best option if you just want a card to plug in and go.

Overclocking was easy with the ASUS GPU Tweak software and we managed to get a decent clock speed and a nice boost to the GDDR5 speed too. It’s clear from our graphs though that the ASUS GTX780Ti DirectCU II OC, whilst still being as great as any GTX780Ti would be, isn’t up there with the highest levels of performance. In general in nearly every benchmark it was behind the other GTX780Ti’s we’ve tested. This is more than likely down to the silicone lottery rather than the range as a whole, we can’t help but wish we could have squeezed a little more from it considering how good the DCUII cooler performs.

Speaking of the cooling, the DirectCU II is as excellent here as it has proven in many other applications. The card is quiet and temperatures are kept well under control. We also like the all black look of the cooler and although you can add the stickers if you really want to, we think it’s better left au naturel.

Available for around the £560 mark the ASUS is priced in the middle of the GTX780Ti range. It’s slightly more than stock cards with reference coolers, but slightly less than some of the higher overclocked offerings around. Its performance matches its price-tag and for that reason, as well as the inherent performance available with the GK110, we are happy to award the ASUS GTX780Ti DirectCU II OC our OC3D Performance award.

    

Thanks to ASUS for supplying the GTX780Ti DirectCU II OC for review. Discuss your thoughts in the OC3D Forums.