High End Computer Parts And News: ASUS GTX 680 DirectCU II Video Card Review

the GTX 680’s birth has been a troubled one from its first day on the market. Even though it was able to thoroughly trounce the competition in nearly every category from power consumption to price to performance, widespread availability seemed to be a bridge too far. Some claimed popularity was the root cause of NVIDIA’s misfortunes while others shouted the words “manufacturing issues!” from atop their cardboard boxes. Regardless of the underlying reasons, the end result remained the same: until recently, GTX 680 backorder lists were long and getting your hands on one of these cards required patience rather than cold hard cash.

In some respects, the GTX 680’s situation has improved and some reference version cars are now readily available but this is mostly due to the GTX 670 taking a good amount of heat off its bigger brother. This acts as a double edged sword since some GTX 670s can run even with a GTX 680 while retailing for about $100 less so one shouldn’t wonder why the higher end Kepler GPUs are now regularly in-stock items. Unfortunately, high demand, custom cards have been announced and seem to be trickling into retailers’ warehouses but they’re rare at best and paper launches at worst.

This long lead-up brings us to the situation we find ourselves in with the ASUS GTX 680 2GB DirectCU II TOP. Since it was first announced this has been one of the most highly anticipated and sought after GTX 680 cards on the market but it is nearly impossible to find. So you may wonder why it is actually being reviewed here. Well, we’re eternal optimists here at Hardware Canucks so we’re willing to bet the DirectCU II TOP should eventually be available in larger quantities. Hopefully.

Looking at the paper specifications, it isn’t hard to see why this particular GTX 680 is so highly regarded among enthusiasts. ASUS has increased the Base Clock by just over 130MHz while the Boost Clock should hit at least 1202MHz. Ours tended to Boost itself up to 1300MHz in most games (well above the 1110MHz we saw with the reference version), likely because of the DirectCU’s incredible thermal dissipation. We just wish the TOP Edition would have received a memory speed increase but from our understanding ASUS skipped over this in order to ensure broad spectrum compatibility and longevity.

Another reason for the DirectCU II TOP’s popularity boils down to price. Bleeding edge performance normally dictates an ultra high cost and although $539 is a hefty amount to pay, it certainly isn’t outrageous either.

ASUS hasn’t held anything back from the DirectCU II TOP’s design but the pitfalls normally associated with ASUS’ high end DirectCU II cooler are back with a vengeance. The engineering that went into this heatsink is significant but in order to expand its thermal mass while still retaining ATX standards necessitated that the DirectCU II expanded upwards rather than outwards. The result is one massive card which dwarfs literally everything else on the market and takes up three whole expansion slots. Those of you with limited space within your enclosure may want to steer clear of this card and it can even block additional expansion slots on some motherboards. Nonetheless, as we will see in the temperature testing section, the benefits from such an expansive heatsink may be well worth some sacrifices.
BATMAN: ARKHAM CITY is a great looking game when all of its detail levels are maxed out but it also takes a fearsome toll on your system. In this benchmark we use a simple walkthrough that displays several in game elements.
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Battlefield 3 (DX11)

we used a sequence from the Rock and Hard Place mission. The results may seem lower than normal and this is due to the fact that after playing through the game multiple times, this one are was found to be the most demanding on the GPU. As with all of the tests, we try to find a worst case scenario in order to ensure a given card can properly play through the whole game instead of just a “typical” section.

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Crysis 2 (DX11)

Crysis 2 with the DX11 and Texture Package installed not only looks great but it is a strain on any GPU. For this benchmark, we used a classic runthrough which includes far views, explosions, combat and close-in knifing; basically every hallmark of gameplay.

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