➤ ASUS GeForce GTX 780Ti DirectCU II Review 🎮

A still valid choice.

From the release date to the launch of the new flagship based on MAXWELL architecture, the Gtx 780 TI proudly defended the brand NVIDIA, guaranteeing it the primacy among the best performing cards on the market. The arrival of the GTX 980 and the cheaper GTX 970, instead of turning off the lights on the glorious Kepler architecture, thanks to a price reduction decided by NVIDIA a few days ago, which in the case of the 780ti reaches up to 30%, has made this graphics card single processor even more interesting, even considering the performance not so far from the new flagship NVIDIA, or the GTX 980 and much higher than those of the smaller sister GTX 970, at least in factory configuration.

As gamers, therefore, we decided to put a flaming one to the test ASUS GeForce GTX 780Ti DirectCU II with some of the most interesting titles on the PC market currently, and with some of the most "tough" in terms of hardware requirements, to evaluate whether the choice of a 780Ti can still represent a sensible choice for those who are about to upgrade their PC or buy a new card, perhaps taking advantage of some "sale".

But before moving on to the cold numbers, let's take a closer look at the configuration proposed by ASUS and which, on paper, should guarantee higher performance by about 6%, compared to the reference version.

The GTX 780Ti DirectCU II is equipped with DIRECT CU II architecture, a technology developed by Asus which, by putting the heat pipes (4 of 10mm each) in direct contact with the GPU, guarantees heat dissipation speeds that are approximately 20% higher than to the reference version of the 780TI; all this, combined with the two large fans named Cooltech, which have a small central blower that facilitates the disposal of hot air in all directions, and is able to guarantee even greater silence in critical conditions and better cooling of the board.

The Asus solution thanks to its improved cooling capabilities is able to offer a slightly higher clock at 975 mhz compared to the reference solution, which stops at 875 mhz, without affecting the idle temperatures, which are practically identical to those of the version with lower clock. In addition, thanks to the supplied Asus GPUTweak software, we were able to bring the clock up to 1020 and 1050 without any kind of problem, so much so that we decided to use it as the default configuration, which proved to be very useful, as we will see in the benchmarks. later, to try to "max" the graphics settings of some titles and in particular of Ryse: Son of Rome.

Compared to the GTX 970, as you can see from the graph below, the 780 Ti still has some features such as a greater number of shader units. 2880 against 1664 but it is behind in the ROPs 48 to 64, however the performance of the Asus GeForce GTX 780Ti still remains superior to what we achieved in the 970 review.

The test machine

Before we begin, here are the specifications of the test machine

AMD FX 8350 4.0ghz - OC 4.2 ghz

RAM Corsair VEngeance 8gb
ASROCK 970 EXTREME 4
Samsung 840 Pro + WD BLUE 1TB SSD (games installed on the latter)
Cooler Master 700W power supply

The Unigine test

In the test of graphics cards, Unigine is certainly one of the most flexible and popular tools. Thanks to a free version that has practically everything a fan could want, Unigine results and scores have become a de facto standard. Therefore, here are the results on our machine, compared to those made with two rather common cards, always under the NVIDIA brand and branded ASUS, the GTX 660 OC Edition and ASUS Strix 750 Ti OC edition 2, the latter entry level of the maxwell family and of which you can find a review here

Space for games

Finally the results with the games tested. In particular, our attention was focused on three of the most recent and expensive titles in terms of hardware resources; in particular: Ryse Son of Rome, Shadow of Mordor e Dead Rising 3, and two titles, Metro 2033 e Last light, both contained in the recent bundle Redux, capable of giving, perhaps also due to a bad optimization, a hard time even to the most performing configurations.

About Ryse Son Rome, as anticipated in our review, the Crytek title will represent the new reference point for PC graphics, with very advanced graphics settings and a truly exceptional visual rendering. To achieve the graphics performance indicated in the graph you will see, we had to resort to a slight OC, not only of the graphics card, but also of the processor Fx8350 which went from 4.0 ghz in the basic configuration to 4.2 ghz in the test one. In fact, the processor seems to represent the most evident bottleneck in our tests.

Different speech instead for Shadow of Mordor, the title is equipped with a very valid internal benchmark and above all enjoys a perfect optimization that has allowed us to max out practically all the settings and achieve consistent frame rates above 60fps.

Dead Rising 3 Capcom's output was also incredibly heavy, making it virtually impossible to max the settings and keep the frame rate constant around 60fps, even with top configurations. The arrival of some patches has definitely improved the situation which, however, does not change the consideration that it is a very heavy title that however our Asus GTX 780 Ti has managed great, with a frame rate well above 40. A little 'disappointing are the results with Metro Last light and especially Metro 2033; In spite of a rather old release date, the two titles were the heaviest tested on our machine; even with a medium-high configuration (let's say around 1000 euros) like ours, the result was, with the maximum details, a rather unstable frame rate that dropped to below 20FPS in some particularly excited phases. Also in this case the number one suspect seems to be the processor, and in fact the situation has rather improved with the overclock at 4.2 ghz, although we cannot yet cry a miracle.

Conclusions

From what has been said and seen with the graphs above, the 780Ti is still a very valid choice for all those who are willing to switch to a new graphics card, and the ASUS GTX 780Ti DirectCU II is certainly one of the best choices even considering the recent price drop. Thanks to the DIRECT CU II technology we were also able to bring it up to 1050mhz without any problem, squeezing even more power and getting closer to the clocks of the new Maxwell architectures, about which we reserve the right to give you our opinion in the next review. For now, just know that the 970 in the reference configuration turned out to be slightly behind the 780 TI in all the titles tested above, making the NVIDIA proposal with a Kepler processor even more interesting.