 This video is brought to you by the Corsair Obsidian 350D Micro ATX case. Exceptional expansion and cooling flexibility for compact high-performance PCs. Visit corsair.com slash obsidian to learn more. Now I've heard a whole lot of claims about non-reference cards running cooler and overclocking better and... blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. But... this time, prior to doing the unboxing, this is not the first time we've taken this card out of the box. We have validated it. So this right here is the ASUS GTX 760 DirectCU2 OC, and if that name wasn't long enough for you, then I can put some other stuff in there. 2GIG Direct Power, a Super Alloy Power, Windows 8 Ready, 20% Cooler, Vastly Quieter. Whew. What does it all amount to? Let's go ahead and open up the card. So there you go. Inside, you find a dual PCIe 6-pin to PCIe 8-pin adapter. And you find a graphics card. You also find a speed setup, which I think is their way of saying, Quick Start Guide! Also, throw me away! Download the drivers off of the ASUS website, or better yet, off of the NVIDIA website. And... yeah, actually, NVIDIA website. And then get all the cool utilities and stuff that you need off of the ASUS website. So let's check out this card. So there's the usual ASUS advantages. So they've redesigned the cooler as well as the PCB. So physically, custom PCB. So they're using their SAP Super Alloy Power MOSFETs, 5K rated caps, as well as alloy-based inductors. They're using their new Direct Power feature. I'm gonna go ahead and turn this over so you guys can read that right side up. And this basically acts like a power superhighway, is I think the way that they describe it in their literature. But I'm gonna explain it in a way that might be a little bit more meaningful. Think about this. When you have a super thin extension cord and you try to run something like a space heater off of it, what happens? The cord gets hot. That's bad. That's terrible, actually. Whereas when you have a nice thick power cord, the resistance of that cord to the electricity flowing in it is less. Therefore, it stays cool even with high draw components on the other side. That, my friends, is what Direct Power is all about. So instead of relying on simply the traces inside the PCB themselves to transfer power to the GPU and from the GPU, this Direct Power feature goes, nope, we're gonna go around that. And it provides, well, okay, it's a power superhighway. Fine. So we go back to Asus's way of describing it. So it reduces impedance and reduces GPU temperatures. Both of these are good things. The DirectCU2 cooler uses direct contact copper heat pipes. There are four nickel plated copper heat pipes, two of which are thick style heat pipes going out to the outer parts of the aluminum heat sink thin stack. And then two of them are thinner heat pipes that are going out to the, well, the aluminum heat sink thin stack. And it's also got two especially tuned dustproof fans. So tuned fans basically means they have the right static pressure to airflow ratio. And dustproof means they are double sealed so that you're not going to have dust buildup getting inside the bearings itself, reducing the lifespan. Asus figures, these are good for about an extra 10,000 hours of lifetime versus a standard fan. You've also got a MOSFET VRM heat sink, which hopefully I can find somewhere in there. Yes, I can. I'm actually just going to have to take the PCB off. We'll do a B-roll shot of that, but don't worry too much about it. Basically better cooling for the hottest part of the card. Now in terms of raw specs, like all GeForce GTX 760s, it uses a GK104 core slightly overclocked. So 1.006 gigahertz base clock and then 1071 megahertz boost clock. And it's got two gigs of GDDR5 at six gigahertz. So eight pieces, four on the back, four on the front, presumably. Yep, they're on there. Two 56-bit memory bus, just like all other 760s. PCI Express 3.0 interface, two SLI fingers for up to three-way SLI. And on the back, four connectors, two dual-link DVI, one HDMI and one display port, giving you full support for NVIDIA 3D vision surround off of a single card. Of course, with gaming cases being as windowed as they are these days, if the card didn't look good, you probably wouldn't even be considering it. And the good news is that it does. It's got a nice shroud, plastic shroud, mind you, with a matte black overall theme with some glossy black as well as glossy red accents. I personally think the DirectCU2 cards, I personally think they look great. They look very functional to me, whereas you have fancier cards out there, like, for example, a reference GTX 770 is very, very fancy. But this will actually keep the card running cooler, which, because it supports GPU Boost 2.0, is important. Because the cooler the card runs, the more often it will be running in its boost state. I also really like the way that Asus has done the PCB extension on the back of the card. Many of these modern cards have little, like, plastic extender pieces. No, no, Asus says, we're going to do a metal extension. It's going to have aluminum heatsink fins, and it's going to not look cheesy, even though the card itself is quite small and quite compact. This extension is for functional reasons, and the reason is that, well, you need to fit lots of cooling on the card, even though it's a small PCB. So this allows them to have the fan not just be hanging off into the middle of nowhere. One unique thing about this card is it uses a single 8-pin PCI Express power connector. First time I've seen this, and I've always, I've wondered for a long time why we continued to see mid-power cards with dual 6-pins, as opposed to a single 8-pin, and I guess Asus sort of was asking themselves the same thing, because that is done. Software-wise, make sure you grab GPU Tweak. It's specifically designed for Asus cards, allows you to use all the functionality in terms of overclocking that you can, and don't forget, guys, that with their, oh, GPU hotwire, that's what it's called, and supported Asus motherboards, you can actually directly overvolt the GPU in ways that are technically not really allowed by Nvidia, but, I see, I don't even think, I don't even think they talk about it. That's the funny thing about it. So certain, certain boards, particularly their ROG boards, do support that feature. Yeah, they're not even talking about it. It's like, well, no, you know, you can do it, but we're just going to keep it very quiet. And, right, so let's get down to performance. Overclocking is always, in theory, better on these non-reference cards, but in our experience, this card did overclock better than our reference card. So we only ran a couple of benchmarks just to show you guys sort of what you can expect. We used our standard graphics card testing test bench, so 3960x 4 GHz, 16 gigs of RAM, 128 gig SSD, 1000 watt power supply, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Our stock 760 ran at about 1.15 GHz on the core, 3.348 GHz on the memory, and our DirectCU2 OC ran at 1280 MHz on the core, much better, and 3456 on the RAM. Very cool. So what did this amount to in the real world? Well, basically, a couple percent performance improvement. So we ran Crysis 3, and I'm not going to spend too much time on these slides, but we also ran Far Cry 3, and we saw, however small, remember, these are the same cards running the same drivers, essentially, performance improvements. So it costs a couple percent more than a reference card and performs a couple percent better. I guess you can't ask for much more than that. Thanks for checking out my unboxing and first look at the GeForce GTX 760 DirectCU2 OC from ASUS. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos. Let me know what you think of this card in the comments, and guys, please do like the video. It helps me out a whole whack-load of a ton. It really does.