The Cooler Master glacer 240l CPU Cooler delivers the convenience of an
all-in-one and the performance of a custom water cooler click now to learn
more now the last time I reviewed a hybrid air/water cooled graphics card
was back in 2007 when I was doing some
guest writing for Hardware con.com under the pseudonym missile proall and I
reviewed The Cooler Master Hydra 8800 since then both I and the concept of
developing a heat sink that also works well as a water block have grown up
quite a bit with a Seuss leading the charge in a big way with several of
their recent Rog series motherboards featuring hybrid cooled designs that
allow the end user to choose whether they want air cooling or water cooling
now the first reaction to a hybrid
design that you can use either way from a purist perspective is well then it
probably sucks at both and in many cases that's probably right but let's take a
closer look at ausa's Poseidon GTX 780
before we finish judging it ehy all right so it comes clocked at a bog
standard 1,6 MHz boost clock with a bog
standard 3 gigs of RAM and support for all the usual NVIDIA Technologies
including GYN Cuda SLI physx gam stream GeForce experience with Shadow play and
future direct X12 support but like many non-reference cards the differentiation
point of this guy right here is in the attention to detail given to it by the
board maker the card features a 10 phase
power design with a susu's premium dig plus vrm and better componentry
including their super alloy power phases which promise longer lifetime cooler
operation better overclocking and no coil wine on the front we find a couple
of 90 mm fans with a susus dust proof design that keeps dust out of the
bearings for a longer lifespan other than the slightly more aggressive Rog
themed shroud though there's really not much to indicate here that this is a
thinly disguised wolf under the sheep's clothing onto IO we've got two DVI ports
in HDMI port and a DisplayPort Port allowing up to three monitors and NVIDIA
surround with an additional auxiliary display and the SLI connectors at the
top support two three and four-way SLI configurations at the bottom of the card
the PCIe connector is a 16x gen 3 connector but it's not until we get
around to the back here that things start to get interesting that brushed
aluminum back plate marginally improves cool but more importantly looks
absolutely Beast and the illuminated Rog
logo on the top won't hurt matters either then what's this bam just got
real industry standard G1 quarter Barb
sockets looks like isus has learned a thing or two from their years of
integrating water cooling on motherboards standards are there for a
reason they improve compatibility and even allow us to put sexy red right
angle fittings from bits power on this Beast
H finishing up on the outside of the card we've got an inverted six pin and 8
Pin power connector and I hope they start doing this on all of their cards
it actually makes me wonder why I accepted the terrible ergonomics of the
standard connectors pressing the clip with my thumb is much easier than
pressing it with my index finger flipped around the other way that's a really cool idea all right so now let's talk
about what's under the hood of what assus calls a direct c2o cooler its
Vapor chamber and water Channel design is in my mind the most Innovative thing
about this card and where the performance you're going to see later really comes from a vapor chamber is
basically a pancake shaped heat pipe that spreads heat out across its surface
they're expensive to begin with and one with an embedded water channel in it
must have cost a fortune to design and implement but it's a great solution to
the problem that Cooler Master had all those years ago how do you get water
close to the heat being given off by the GPU core without seriously hurting the
performance of your air cooling solution for the customers who aren't using water
yet Cooler Master just put a water Channel next to a heat pipe but that's
not a lot of contact area for heat exchange and this is a much more elegant
solution is it perfect no it'll be more
restrictive than a normal full cover block but it gives the user the
flexibility to go air now and water later without spending a bunch and still
realizing a big part of the performance boost that you can get by switching to
liquid cooling to help the vapor chamber ASUS put three additional heat pipes
between it and the more distant parts of the aluminum fin array this helps carry
some heat out to the second fan which with some help from the large diecast
unisync that's sitting on the top of the card here cools the vrm area as well as
helping out with the GPU now I hate to do this to you guys but before I hand
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operation with whatever power hungry peripherals you might be using all right
so the weit's over over to Luke for some sexy and
provocative uh graphics card results all
right guys welcome to the performance review of our 780 Poseidon this card as
you know is both air and water cooled capable so when you're looking at the
dock remember to look at both the air and water cooled rows for this card as
the core clock speeds are definitely different in terms of platform we had to
change things up a little bit as we're water cooling this card so we wanted it
to be on the same bench as all the other cars that were testing so in terms of
CPU we're running a 3770k and in terms of RAM we're running 8 gigs of RAM at
1600 MHz and then as you know the gpus vary and you can see all of their clock
speeds again in the overclocking dock linked below this video in terms of tips
for overclocking there isn't a ton to say this wasn't a super complicated car
to overclock although one thing that stood out a lot was how much GPU boost
can skew things the second you put this card on water it's immediately a lot
better and you can play with it a little bit more as you'll have more Headroom
thermally even if you have your thermal cap set at 95° and you're not getting
anywhere close to there my my load temperatures for this card under air
were about 77 and then with a thermal cap of 95 and then when I went to water
load went down to about 45 but then I had a lot more head room to play with
which is kind of funky GPU boost can do that so just remember that if you're
overclocking this card in terms of performance it did really well it's a
higher Bend card than a reference card you'll see so it's just usually
automatically better and then also underwater it gains more performance
there one thing that's really nice about this card is the versatility of both
because I was able to take this air cool it Benchmark it like that strap two
tubes to it test it underwater it worked perfectly fine and then go right back to
Air and there was no real issues one thing to note if you're going to do that
is to drain the card before you go back to air as you don't want any pressure
problems with that water heating up in the closed system once those plugs are
screwed on either way guys that's about it thank you for watching this video on
the 780 Platinum if you want to see all of our lineus tips video be sure to
subscribe right here on YouTube and comment below if you have anything
interesting to say about this air water hybrid cooling setup like dislike
favorite share all that fancy stuff and if you want to go to The Forum to
comment because there's usually a better discussion going on there and you don't
like the ads that are on the Forum be sure to contribute and then that's about
it thank you guys for watching and I'll see you next time