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more now I've heard a whole lot of claims about non-reference cards running
cooler and overclocking better and blah
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
but this time prior to doing the unboxing this is not the first time
we've taken this card out of the box we have validated it
so this right here is the ASUS GTX 760
direct cu2 OC and if that name wasn't long enough for you then I can put some
other stuff in there 2 gig direct power super alloy power Windows 8 ready 20%
cooler vastly quieter what does it all amount to let's
go ahead and open up the card so there you go inside you find a dual PCIe 6 pin
to PCIe eight pin adapter and you find a graphics card you also find a speed
setup which I think is their way of saying quick start guide alsoo throw me
away download the drivers off of the ASUS website or ra better yet off of the
NVIDIA website and yeah actually NVIDIA
website and then get like all the cool
utilities and stuff that you need off of the ASUS website so let's check out this
card so there's the usual ASUS advantages so they've redesigned the
cooler as well as the PCB so physically
custom PCB so they're using their sap super alloy power mosfets 5K rated caps
as well as alloy based inductors they're using their new direct power feature I'm
going to go ahead and turn this over so you guys can read that right side up and this basically acts like a powered super
highways I think the way that they described it in their literature but I'm
going to explain it in a way that might be a little bit more meaningful think about this when you have a super thin
extension cord and you try to run something like a space heater off of it
what happens the cord gets hot that's bad that's terrible actually
whereas when you have a nice thick power cord the resistance of that cord to the
electricity flowing in it is less therefore it stays cool even with high
draw components on the other side that my friends is what direct power is all
about so instead of relying on simply the traces inside the PCB themselves to
transfer power to the GPU and from the GPU this direct power feature goes nope
we're going to go around that and it provides well okay it's a power Super
Highway fine so we go back to ASUS's way of describing it so it reduces impedance
and reduces GPU temperatures both of these are good things the direct cu2
cooler uses direct contact copper heat pipes there are four nickel plated
copper heat pipes two of which are thick style heat pipes going out to the outer
parts of the aluminum heat sink fin stack and then two of them are thinner
heat pipes that are going out to the well the aluminum heat sink fin stack
and it's also got two especially tuned dust proof fans so tuned fan F basically
means they have the right static pressure to air flow ratio and dust
proof means they are double sealed so that you're not going to have dust build
up getting inside the bearings itself reducing the lifespan he su figures
these are good for about an extra 10,000 hours of Lifetime versus a standard fan
you've also got a mosfet vrm heat sink which hopefully I can find somewhere in
there yes I can I'm actually just going to have to take the PCB off we'll do a
b-roll shot of that but don't worry too much about it basically better cooling
for the hottest part of the card now in terms of raw specs like all GeForce GTX
760's it uses a GK 104 core slightly
overclocked so 1.6 GHz base clock and then 171 MHz
boost clock and it's got 2 gigs of gddr5 it's 6 GHz so eight pieces four on the
back four on the front presumably Yep they're on there 256-bit memory bus just
like all leather 760's PCI Express 3.0 interface two SLI fingers for up to
three-way SLI and on the back four connectors two dual link DVI one HDMI
and one DisplayPort giving you full support for NVIDIA 3D Vision surround
off of a single card of course with gaming cases being as windowed as they
are these days if the card didn't look good you probably wouldn't even be
considering it and the good news is that it does it's got a nice shroud plastic
shroud mind you with a matte black overall theme with some glossy black as
well as glossy red accents I personally think the direct su2 cards um
I I personally think they look great they look very functional to me whereas
you have fancier cards out there like for example a reference GTX 770 is very
very fancy but this will actually keep the card running cooler which because it
supports GPU Boost 2.0 is important
because the cooler the card runs the more often it will be running in its
boost State I also really like the way that ASUS has done the penis EXT I mean
uh PCB extension on the back of the card many of these modern cards have little
like plastic extender pieces no ASUS says we're going to do a metal extension
it's going to have aluminum heat sink fins and it's going to not look cheesy
even though the card itself is quite small and quite compact this extension
is four functional reasons and the reason is that well you need to fit lots
of cooling on the card even though it's a small PCB so this allows them to have
the fan not just be hanging off into the middle of nowhere one unique thing about
this card is it uses a single 8 Pin PCI Express power connector first time I've
seen this and I've always I've wondered for a long time why we continued to see
mid power cards with dual six pins as opposed to a single eight pin and I
guess ASUS sort of was asking themselves the same thing because that is done
software wise make sure you grab GPU tweak it's specifically designed for
ASUS cards allows you to use all the functionality in terms of overclocking
that you can and don't forget guys that with their oh GPU hot wire that's what
it's called and supported ASUS motherboards you can actually directly
overvolt the GPU in ways that are technically not really all owed by
NVIDIA but I see I don't even think I don't even think they talk about it
that's the funny thing about it so certain certain boards particularly
their Rog boards do support that feature yeah they're not even talking about it
it's like well no you know you can do it but we're just going to keep it very
quiet and uh right so let's get down to Performance overclocking is always in
theory better on these non-reference cards but in our experience this card
did overclock better than our reference card so we only ran a couple of
benchmarks just to show you guys sort of what you can expect we used our standard
graphics card testing test bench so 3960x 4 GHz 16 gigs of RAM 128 gig SSD
th000 wat power supply etc etc etc our stock 760 ran at about 1.15 GHz on the
core 3.34 GHz on the memory and our direct CO2 ran at 1280 MHz on the core
much better and 3456 on the RAM very cool so what did
this amount to in the real world well basically a couple perc performance
Improvement so we ran Crisis 3 and I'm
not going to spend too much time on these slides but we also ran Far Cry 3
and we saw however small remember these
are the same cards running the same drivers essentially performance
improvements so it costs a couple percent more than a reference card and
performs a couple percent better I guess you can't ask for much more than that
thanks for checking out my unboxing and first look at the GeForce GTX 760 direct
cu2 OC from ASUS don't forget to subscribe to lus Tech tips more
unboxings reviews and other computer videos let me know what you think of this card in the comments comments and
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