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the Corsair carbide air 540 High airflow Cube case is great for air cooling or

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liquid cooling check the link in the video description to learn more welcome

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to my unboxing and overview of the GeForce gtx780 direct cu2 OC from ASUS

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so let's go ahead and see what they have to say for themselves on the front of the Box anyway 20% cooler vastly quieter

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and this we believe because like the last ASUS card overview we did we have

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already taken it out of the box and we've already run it through the paces so yes we believe it OC Edition okay

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it's not overclocked much but the advantage isn't necessarily in the

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factory overclock but rather in the fact that because of the design of this

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particular card it runs more efficiently

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and runs cooler which allows GPU Boost 2.0 which remember reacts not only to

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power thresholds as well as uh clock

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speed but also to temperature so allows GPU boost 2 to dynamically increase the

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clock speed of this graphics card it's using a fully custom PCB so that

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includes their Digi plus power so that's their vrm design as well as their sap

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components so super alloy power components this gives effectively better

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overclocking when you use their GPU tweak software which works with any ASUS

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graphics card particularly this one because we found it works very very well

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so one of the things that ASUS has done with with this card is they have moved

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away from something that's been a bit of a staple for

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them whoa that was fun um and that is

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the triple slot design of their very

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high-end cards this is a dual slot card but hold on I'm getting ahead of myself

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it comes with an SLI Bridge it comes with a dual six pin to8 pin adapter and

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it comes with their GPU tweak and Driver which you should ignore and download the

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latest off NVIDIA.com and ASUS's own website as as well as a quick start

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guide so let's look at the card physically now it'll be obvious to

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anyone who's seen a reference 780 that this isn't one but let's go through a

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few of the things that make it non- reference number one it has a back plate

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so this back plate doesn't contribute much to cooling let's be honest with

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ourselves but what it does do is it looks cool and other than that it

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prevents sagging so it actually makes the card more rigid and less likely to

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floop down like we've seen with heavy graphics cards in the past now I me

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mentioned already the dual fan configuration and dual slot

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configuration but there are some other special things about it so number one is

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check this out this is their new cooltech fan design so instead of just

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being focused on blowing air down into the heat sink fins you can see as Seuss

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has built up the cooler around the outside edges of the fan so you can see

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there are aluminum fins here and and this fan is designed to not only blow

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down but also out so that means you're able to take to make better use of the

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heat sink fins that are all around the fan now the secondary cooling fan the

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one that doesn't sit directly over top of the GPU uses their more traditional

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style now the cooler itself in order to even have get any benefit from more air

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flow okay any cooler can get benefit from more air flow whatever I'm trying to segue here all right so the cooler

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itself has another unique feature check this out that right there my friends is

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a 10 mm heat pipe this is the largest I

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have ever seen on a graphics card uh MSI's old superpipe marketing that I

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don't really see them using Much Anymore referred to 8 mm heat pipes of which

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this card has two so there are two 8 mm heat pipes one 10 mm heat pipe and then

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it looks like two 6 mm heat pipes so there are five total heat pipes carrying

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heat away from the GPU core to the

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massive cooler on the rest of this C now speaking of massive coolers there is a

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very very very small P PCB extension

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right here but but it doesn't add a significant amount of overall length to

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the card not like we see with cards like the GTX 7 or the GTX 670 where it has

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like a massive plastic overhang that isn't actually part of the components

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there are LED indicators for the PCI Express slot so you can actually

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diagnose if there's any kind of a power delivery issue with the board itself and

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it has full support for VGA Hotwire so this right here is a PCI Express 3.0

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interface nothing to do with VGA Hotwire except that if if you put that interface

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into a supported ASUS motherboard generally speaking it's their Rog boards

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you can actually overvolt the GPU and various components on the video card in

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ways that NVIDIA never really intended ASUS doesn't advertise this feature on

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their boxes because NVIDIA doesn't like it but there you go the feature is there

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I have confirmed it it is supported now speaking of supported features it's got

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support for 3D Vision surround with two HDMI outputs and

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uh two two HDMI two DVI outputs an HDMI

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output and a DisplayPort output you're going to get a little bit of exhaust out

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the back of the case but generally speaking this is an internal exhaust

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card so you're going to want to make sure you have good case air flow it has two SLI connectors with full support for

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NVIDIA SLI up to three or even four-way

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however four-way just really isn't that recommended these days at the back of

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the card you've got two PCI Express connectors one of them is a six pin and

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one of them is an eight pin and then other than that that's it for

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connectivity what more did you guys really want were you expecting it to have like you know an anchor Port so

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that you could actually use it as an anchor because it's quite heavy and

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there's a good reason for that because in terms of the actual overall heat sink

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Mass available for dissipating Heat this thing has about double what a stock GTX

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780 does now we were a little bit worried about the complexity of removing

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the graphics card cooler from this card but part of what auss I mean just

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looking at all these little screws that it seems like we can't access but part part of what isus takes pride in with

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their direct CU cards is this easy

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disassembly four screws on the back of the GPU right there and that reveals the

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direct contact copper heat pipe so you can actually see the nickel plating

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isn't even on this part direct copper to GPU you can see that 10 mm heat pipe

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those two 8 mm heat pipes as well as those two 6m heat pipes all branching

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out to various parts of the cooler itself here all right so you can see why

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that primary fan is considered the primary fan as well because most of

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where ASUS is carrying the heat so that 10 mil pipe is right here under the

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primary fan this 8 and this 6 mil are sitting right under the primary fan as

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well as any heat that is carried through conduction directly by this block of

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copper and aluminum here will sit directly under that fan as well so the

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secondary one is only really getting some of the 10 ms heat as well as 16 and

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18 both of which are carrying heat quite far away from the GPU which does reduce

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their effectiveness now that we've got the cooler off we can also see part of

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what makes this card tick now this is an overclocked card a referenced GTX 780

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only gets uh a clock speed of around 863

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900 for Boost and this one's at$ 889 941 however there's more to it than that

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because of so here's a vrm heat SN as well as their super alloy power

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components but the advantage that this card gets is because it's more efficient

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and stays within its power Lim limits more effectively it actually is able to

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achieve around 1,32 MHz typical boost

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clock on average from what Aus has seen without any overclocking that means even

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at stock speeds this card should be faster than what they're really saying

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about it on the box which is very very

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cool let's go ahead and show you the rest of the components that are on the

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PCB itself first of all Matt PCB so ASUS

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two thumbs up good job guys you guys rock 3 gigs of 6 G

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um six G six three gigs not six gigs I was I had Titan on the brain there 3

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gigs of 6 gz gddr5 memory so that's

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pretty much the same as any other GTX 780 however it is also getting the

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benefit of their digital power delivery in much the same way that the GPU itself

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does so I think that pretty much wraps it up except what does all this mean in

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the real world I just gave you a whole bunch of ASUS marketing speak but does

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this card actually overclock better than a reference card boom here's a couple

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graphs so in our experience yes we were

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actually able to overclock the direct cu2 card better than we were able to

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overclock our reference card your mileage may vary it's possible we got a

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fantastic direct cu2 although ASUS tells us ours is pretty average it's possible

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that we got a bunk GTX 780 reference card however when NVIDIA seeds those

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cards to reviewers I don't think they pick all the bunk ones to send to

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reviewers so take it with the grain of salt but that's what we think think

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about it leave us a comment under the video what do here's what I want to know

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what do you think ASUS could have improved about the GTX 780 direct cu2

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for me they've addressed the triple slot issue which was a problem for me they've

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I mean yeah okay what what could be improved also like the video guys share

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the video and as always don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech tips

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he