Asus GeForce GTX 760 DirectCU II Unboxing & Review
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
1,539 words · ~7 min read
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this video is brought to you by the Corsair obsidian 350d microatx case
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exceptional expansion and cooling flexibility for compact high performance
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PCS visit Corsair.com obsidian to learn
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more now I've heard a whole lot of claims about non-reference cards running
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cooler and overclocking better and blah
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blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
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but this time prior to doing the unboxing this is not the first time
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we've taken this card out of the box we have validated it
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so this right here is the ASUS GTX 760
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direct cu2 OC and if that name wasn't long enough for you then I can put some
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other stuff in there 2 gig direct power super alloy power Windows 8 ready 20%
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cooler vastly quieter what does it all amount to let's
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go ahead and open up the card so there you go inside you find a dual PCIe 6 pin
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to PCIe eight pin adapter and you find a graphics card you also find a speed
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setup which I think is their way of saying quick start guide alsoo throw me
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away download the drivers off of the ASUS website or ra better yet off of the
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NVIDIA website and yeah actually NVIDIA
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website and then get like all the cool
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utilities and stuff that you need off of the ASUS website so let's check out this
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card so there's the usual ASUS advantages so they've redesigned the
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cooler as well as the PCB so physically
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custom PCB so they're using their sap super alloy power mosfets 5K rated caps
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as well as alloy based inductors they're using their new direct power feature I'm
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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
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highways I think the way that they described it in their literature but I'm
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going to explain it in a way that might be a little bit more meaningful think about this when you have a super thin
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extension cord and you try to run something like a space heater off of it
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what happens the cord gets hot that's bad that's terrible actually
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whereas when you have a nice thick power cord the resistance of that cord to the
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electricity flowing in it is less therefore it stays cool even with high
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draw components on the other side that my friends is what direct power is all
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about so instead of relying on simply the traces inside the PCB themselves to
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transfer power to the GPU and from the GPU this direct power feature goes nope
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we're going to go around that and it provides well okay it's a power Super
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Highway fine so we go back to ASUS's way of describing it so it reduces impedance
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and reduces GPU temperatures both of these are good things the direct cu2
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cooler uses direct contact copper heat pipes there are four nickel plated
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copper heat pipes two of which are thick style heat pipes going out to the outer
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parts of the aluminum heat sink fin stack and then two of them are thinner
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heat pipes that are going out to the well the aluminum heat sink fin stack
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and it's also got two especially tuned dust proof fans so tuned fan F basically
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means they have the right static pressure to air flow ratio and dust
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proof means they are double sealed so that you're not going to have dust build
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up getting inside the bearings itself reducing the lifespan he su figures
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these are good for about an extra 10,000 hours of Lifetime versus a standard fan
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you've also got a mosfet vrm heat sink which hopefully I can find somewhere in
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there yes I can I'm actually just going to have to take the PCB off we'll do a
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b-roll shot of that but don't worry too much about it basically better cooling
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for the hottest part of the card now in terms of raw specs like all GeForce GTX
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760's it uses a GK 104 core slightly
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overclocked so 1.6 GHz base clock and then 171 MHz
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boost clock and it's got 2 gigs of gddr5 it's 6 GHz so eight pieces four on the
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back four on the front presumably Yep they're on there 256-bit memory bus just
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like all leather 760's PCI Express 3.0 interface two SLI fingers for up to
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three-way SLI and on the back four connectors two dual link DVI one HDMI
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and one DisplayPort giving you full support for NVIDIA 3D Vision surround
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off of a single card of course with gaming cases being as windowed as they
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are these days if the card didn't look good you probably wouldn't even be
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considering it and the good news is that it does it's got a nice shroud plastic
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shroud mind you with a matte black overall theme with some glossy black as
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well as glossy red accents I personally think the direct su2 cards um
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I I personally think they look great they look very functional to me whereas
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you have fancier cards out there like for example a reference GTX 770 is very
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very fancy but this will actually keep the card running cooler which because it
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supports GPU Boost 2.0 is important
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because the cooler the card runs the more often it will be running in its
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boost State I also really like the way that ASUS has done the penis EXT I mean
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uh PCB extension on the back of the card many of these modern cards have little
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like plastic extender pieces no ASUS says we're going to do a metal extension
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it's going to have aluminum heat sink fins and it's going to not look cheesy
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even though the card itself is quite small and quite compact this extension
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is four functional reasons and the reason is that well you need to fit lots
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of cooling on the card even though it's a small PCB so this allows them to have
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the fan not just be hanging off into the middle of nowhere one unique thing about
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this card is it uses a single 8 Pin PCI Express power connector first time I've
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seen this and I've always I've wondered for a long time why we continued to see
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mid power cards with dual six pins as opposed to a single eight pin and I
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guess ASUS sort of was asking themselves the same thing because that is done
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software wise make sure you grab GPU tweak it's specifically designed for
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ASUS cards allows you to use all the functionality in terms of overclocking
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that you can and don't forget guys that with their oh GPU hot wire that's what
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it's called and supported ASUS motherboards you can actually directly
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overvolt the GPU in ways that are technically not really all owed by
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NVIDIA but I see I don't even think I don't even think they talk about it
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that's the funny thing about it so certain certain boards particularly
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their Rog boards do support that feature yeah they're not even talking about it
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it's like well no you know you can do it but we're just going to keep it very
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quiet and uh right so let's get down to Performance overclocking is always in
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theory better on these non-reference cards but in our experience this card
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did overclock better than our reference card so we only ran a couple of
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benchmarks just to show you guys sort of what you can expect we used our standard
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graphics card testing test bench so 3960x 4 GHz 16 gigs of RAM 128 gig SSD
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th000 wat power supply etc etc etc our stock 760 ran at about 1.15 GHz on the
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core 3.34 GHz on the memory and our direct CO2 ran at 1280 MHz on the core
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much better and 3456 on the RAM very cool so what did
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this amount to in the real world well basically a couple perc performance
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Improvement so we ran Crisis 3 and I'm
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not going to spend too much time on these slides but we also ran Far Cry 3
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and we saw however small remember these
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are the same cards running the same drivers essentially performance
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improvements so it costs a couple percent more than a reference card and
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performs a couple percent better I guess you can't ask for much more than that
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thanks for checking out my unboxing and first look at the GeForce GTX 760 direct
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cu2 OC from ASUS don't forget to subscribe to lus Tech tips more
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unboxings reviews and other computer videos let me know what you think of this card in the comments comments and
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guys please do like the video it helps me out a whole whack load of a ton it
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really does