Asus GTX 660 DirectCU II Graphics Card Review

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….