ASUS GTX 780 DirectCU II OC Review

The ASUS GTX 780 DirectCU II OC has some big shoes to fill. Its predecessor, the GTX 680 of the same name was one of the best previous-generation cards we tested and highlighted the ways ASUS leveraged their engineering division to create something special.

Amidst the nearly endless number of custom GTX 780 cards, the DirectCU II OC is still quite unique. It uses ASUS’ excellent custom heatsink design, some advanced PWM technologies, a nearly endless list of features and higher clock speeds. But, most importantly of all, the GTX 780 DirectCU II OC goes for just $669 or $20 more than a reference version.

That may still be a completely unaffordable level for the vast majority of gamers but when you consider a TITAN still retails for $999 and pre-overclocked GTX 780s have flirted with its performance bracket, ASUS seems to have packed a good amount of value into their card. Plus, it’s also $10 less expensive than Gigabyte’s WindForce OC the same price as EVGA’s SC ACX edition.


There is of course a reason behind ASUS’ fair pricing structure for this card: while it is overclocked, the base and Boost frequencies aren’t that much higher than a reference version. However, there’s more here than what first meets the eye. Due to the advanced heatsink design, there’s quite a bit of thermal overhead, something which GeForce Boost 2.0 can take full advantage of. That means the average clock speed we observed was a constant 1032MHz, which is within spitting distance of Gigabyte’s 1071MHz.

On the memory side of things, we have the usual affair with 3GB of reference-clocked GDDR5. Supposedly there’s a good amount of overclocking headroom here so the standardized frequency isn’t all that concerning.

Since ASUS has packed an absolute laundry list of features into their GXT 780 DirectCU II OC, we’re going to go about this review in a slightly different manner. Instead of jamming everything onto the first page we’ll be going over every unique addition separately and let me tell you, there are a lot of them.