Asus GTX 660 DirectCU II Graphics Card Review

Recently we have looked at a number of tweaked and tuned cards from a number of manufacturers that offer up more performance out the box, which for a large number of users is a great thing. There is a downside to this however and that lies with the cost - an overclocked card comes with a slightly higher price tag to its stock counterpart and for some people, this little increase in price is not always worth the bother. Why not just get a reference specified card with a performance cooler and give it the overclock treatment yourself - after all it's easy enough to do that these days and a number of vendors - including Asus, even include the software to do so in the box. So if each manufacturer is offering up cards that on paper have the same level of performance, what sets each apart? Well whilst this is obvious for some, others may not realise that this is where it all comes down to one vital component of any card; the cooler. Very few manufacturers these days simply ship out cards that are purely reference designs with their own branding on as they don't stand out for the crowd. Consequently we see the big names battling it out on the cooler ground in a heated battle of which the heatsink and fan combo is vital. Gigabyte hold their patch with Windforce, MSI have Twin Frozr, Sapphire have their vapour chamber design and Asus have the popular DirectCU II to put forward. The box that Asus uses, follows a similar design path to other boxes that we have seen recently, including that of the 660Ti DirectCU II TOP that we looked at not too long ago. Alongside the card we find a 'Speed Setup' manual, driver CD with GPU Tweak and a DVI-VGA adaptor. Asus this time round have opted for a twin fan cooler design and like many other Asus coolers, we find it slightly offset to the right to give better airflow around the I/O end of the card. At the top and bottom we can just see the heatpipes that all lead to the GPU core. Each of the two 80mm fans have eleven blades for whisper quiet operation and behind these we can see a part of the DirectCU II cooler. Nestled behind the heatsink at the top end of the card, we find a single 6-pin power connector. On the opposite of the PCB behind where the power connector is, we find two LEDs which alternate between green and red to indicate when the power cable is connected and working. The GTX 660 offers up support for two way SLI so a single bridge is present for two cards to be connected. Finally moving round to the I/O we find a fairly standard NVIDIA output array with two DVI (one DVI-D and one DVI-I), a single HDMI and a full sized DisplayPort. To the top left we find a small grill for heat ventilation out of the card. As this card is only reference spec'd, we see from GPU-Z that we have a core clock speed of 980MHz, which boosts upto 1033MHz and a memory clock speed of 1502MHz (6004MHz effective). The test the performance of this card, we use the latest drivers direct from the manufacturer and run each test three times to obtain a fair average set of results. Test System: Asus Rampage IV Extreme Intel Core i7 3960X 16GB Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz Antec Kuhler 920 Corsair HX1050W Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD Lian Li T60 Dell U3011 We would like to thank Asus, Corsair, Kingston, and Lian Li for supplying us with our test system components. Games used: Aliens Vs Predator Dirt Showdown Hitman: Absolution Metro 2033 Sleeping Dogs Hardware used: Plug-in electricity usage monitor Sound level meter Software used: 3DMark 11 HWMonitor Unigine Heaven Benchmark Windows 7 Professional 64-bit 3DMark 11 is the latest offering from Futuremark, taking full advantage of DirectX 11 by utilising tessellation features and volumetric lighting. It takes your graphics and CPU hardware to the edge to simulate the most extreme conditions whilst working as a stand point to compare results with other users online. 3DMark11 gives us our first indication as the where the GTX 660 lies in the field of play and with a performance result of 6504, its sits at a similar performance level to the older generation GTX 580 - goes to show how well Kepler has evolved. Heaven is regarded to be one of the most intensive Benchmarking utilities about at the moment along with the likes of 3DMark. It makes use of highly comprehensive tessellation technology, advanced SSAO (screen-space ambient occlusion) and a highly defined light algorithm to produce ever changing light conditions amongst other items. In Heaven we see that the stock card is only a few frames behind the OC variant from Gigabyte as we would expect, topping out at 41fps at full 2560x1600 resolutions. Aliens Vs Predator is a science fiction first-person shooter computer game that relies on DirectX 11 and high amounts of Tessellation in conjunction to give enhanced shadows and fantastic textures to the surrounds and characters within the game. On to the first game test, the 660 again is right in the field of play of a Radeon 7870 and just a fraction behind Gigabyte's overclocked SKU. Dirt Showdown is a video game from Codemasters and is part of the Colin McRae Rally games revolving around a tour of events to compete in allowing you to win money and prizes to spend on new cars and upgrades as well as unlocking new events and races. The game uses high resolution textures and AA settings to simulate dust particles, terrain and damage to the vehicles. Dirt Showdown continues the trend with the OC card sitting a frame or two ahead at each resolution as we would expect. Hitman: Absolution is an action-adventure stealth game developed by IO Interactive and published by Square Enix and is the fifth entry in the Hitman game series. The game runs on the Glacier 2 game engine and includes high levels of anti-aliasing, DirectX 11 technology, lighting effects and depth of field technology. Hitman: Absolution gave a slightly surprising result as the stock card gave a couple of extra frames over its overclocked sibling. We did run the tests again just to ensure there were no anomalies, but similar results were found. Metro 2033 is a first-person shooter game based in the Russian metro system. Metro 2033 is very similar to the much loved game STALKER as it is developed by the same programmers. The game utilises DirectX 11 and relies heavily on tessellation features and is considered to be one of the most graphics-intense games on the market. Metro 2033 as we all know pushes hardware to its absolute limits again pushing out a respectable 42fps at 1920x1080 makes for good gameplay. 2650x1600 does fall a little with only 25fps, but lowering the quality just a little will balance this out. Sleeping Dogs is a 2012 open world action-adventure game based around Wei Shen; a Chinese-American police officer going undercover. The game utilises DirectX 11 features as well as high quality intensive reflections and high-resolutions textures. Sleeping dogs again finds the card a couple of frames behind the OC variant at 1680 and 1920 resolutions, but at 2560 we find the stock card giving a couple of extra frames to play with. Noise is generally the bain of most consumers lives and in the hope of finding the quietest operation, we feel it's necessary to show you the audio level of components. We use the same components throughout this test and use a sound level meter to record the audio level of the system with a passive graphics card installed. Once we have the level recorded with the passive card, we continue to change the graphics card for the one that we are testing. Due to us having the audio level recorded before installation, it gives us a guide to work with and shows that anything over our initial level is an audio gain. Taking a look at the acoustic performance, the DirectCU II cooler makes a stand and in a similar fashion to what we found not too long ago with the 660Ti TOP, the DirectCU II cooler this time round gives us the second quietest results that we have seen to date over a reference design cooler. To test power consumption, we monitor the overall power of the system through a plug-in electricity usage monitor at an idle and load state. This allows us to show the fluctuation between how much power draw the graphics card takes at idle and at load. By monitoring the overall usage of the whole system, it gives an easy comparison if you wish to do the same yourself as opposed to buying very expensive individual testing equipment. Like acoustics, power consumption is important and the 660 at load uses around the same total power at the 660 OC from Gigabyte, however at idle we find a draw of only 125W from the entire system. Measuring temperatures is all about being consistent therefore we keep a steady eye on monitoring the ambient room temperature to make sure that it stays the same. While this is constantly being monitored, we measure the idle temperature of the card using HWMonitor over a 15 minute period. Once this has been recorded, we set FurMark into motion for 15 minutes and record the results again. Taking the acoustic performance into account, the DirectCU II cooler performs very well at idle speeds staying around the 30 degrees region and at load the slightly lesser spec core results in a load temperature of 63 Celsius. As we've seen throughout, the stock 660 GPU core that Asus has used is only a fraction behind that of Gigabyte's OC model and we want to really see if it is worth buying a pre overclocked model and pushing it a little further or get a reference board and then take it right up to the top level manually, after all Asus even give you the tools to do it with. We know that the 660 can run in the region of 1100MHz when overclocked, so our first jump after raising the cards power limit and voltage, is to take the GPU core straight to 1100MHz. With this not even breaking a sweat when tested in 3DMark, the core was slowly raised from there until we started getting driver crashes at 1120MHz and then slowly backing down a little to 1115MHz where we found the card to be stable. On the memory front, we know that there is a lot of headroom to be had and whilst the core is what makes most of the difference to the overall performance of the card, overclocking the GDDR5 memory as well just gives that little bit extra on top. Jumping up in what seems to be large chunks of 50MHz, we quickly took the memory clock past the 1600MHz barrier and after getting a few artefacts at 1680MHz, we adged this back as well until we settled at 1672MHz (8360MHz effective). Overall we resulted in a 13% gain on the core clock speed and a 11% overclock on the memory side. We then wanted to check stability and to see what kind of increase we had got from overclocking the card further so we fired up 3DMark 11 to see how the score had changed on the Extreme preset from its original score of 2366 points Whilst we did get a ~12% gain on the cards clocked performance, in 3DMark, this only corresponds to a ~3% gain in real world performance. With so many pre-overclocked cards on the market these days, it is worth wondering why we would even consider purchasing a stock board with a better cooler. As I previously mentioned however, there are a number of advantages of doing so. First and foremost, the biggest advantage has got to be cost. Okay, so there is only a small increase to get a factory overclocked card, but with overclocking so easy to do these days, you may as well save the cost and do it yourself and put the few pounds that you will save towards other areas of the system such as processor or memory. The other reason for saving cost is if you're on a tight budget or quite frankly don't quite have the need for the slight overclock in the first instance. For these reasons we can see why the partners still offer up a reference speed card, covering the grounds of cost for performance and inspiring budding overclockers to work with a clean slate and clock their card up to squeeze the extra performance out that we know is locked inside. Looking at other aspects of the card, there isn't a lot that we can say that wouldn't be stepping on grounds that we have already covered. In the battle to get the best cooler out there, instead of using a reference design, we will admit that it is a close battle and each manufacturer that we work with have their advantages over the other for various reasons. Asus' strong hold at this moment in time certainly has to be on the acoustics front with the current top three positions held by Direct CU coolers and until we see a new revisions of coolers from the competition coming out, I don't see these changing any time soon. So where does the bottom line lie? Well simply put it is very worth the thought of saving a few pounds and looking at the stock speed cards over the factory overclocked variants. You get all the same features, and with the included software you can quickly and easily raise this card to the same performance level - and some. Value for money? I'd say so....