Asus GTX 660 DirectCU II Graphics Card Review

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.