 This video is brought to you by the Corsair Vengeance K70 and K95. These fully mechanical keyboards are designed for performance gaming. Visit corsair.com slash Vengeance Gaming to learn more. Welcome to what amounts to basically an unboxing and second look at the GeForce GTX 770 DirectCU2 from ASUS. Now I call it a second look because I've already had this card out of the box and I have actually already had a chance to benchmark it. So, okay. I'm gonna spoil the surprise a little bit. It's a GeForce GTX 770, which means it's based on the same GK104 core as the GTX 680, a fully enabled core to be more clear. So, okay, so it's a GTX 680. No! Because it's clocked higher, this one in particularly, because it's an OC level card, and it also has 7 GHz GDDR5 memory as opposed to the 6 GHz GDDR5 memory that we found on the original GTX 680. Now the first things we find inside are a nice black ASUS box with some gold printing on it, as well as a bunch of accessories that we didn't get with our reference card that came direct from NVIDIA. So it's interesting to see what ASUS includes. So they've got a quick start guide, as well as some drivers and GPU tweak software that you do well to download directly from the ASUS website. And finally, last but not least, a dual 6-pin to single 8-pin PCI Express power adapter. Next up is the card itself. Now, the first thing you're gonna notice about it in all likelihood is going to be the cooler. The DirectCU2's cooler gets its name from the copper heat pipes, as well as the direct contact that they make with the GPU itself. This improves thermal efficiency, as well as improving overall performance of the card, especially in an overclocked environment. There are two fans on it, each of which is sealed against dust, making it dust-proof and adding to the longevity of the card, and allowing them to cover a wider area of the card itself, providing more airflow not only to cool the GPU itself, because it's connected with these nice fat heat pipes to all of these fins, but also the other components under the heatsink fins all over the entire PCB of the graphics card. On the back of it, we find not a whole lot that you can see, except for a backplate. This contributes to the rigidity of the card, which is especially important when cards get longer and heavier, and they're installed in chassis that only really fasten them at the screws at the top here, as well as the PCI Express slot. And the last thing that we see are a couple of diagnostic LEDs right under the 6-pin and 8-pin PCI Express connectors that tell us if there's any kind of a power problem causing the card to be non-functional. Direct-C U2 coolers are also well regarded for their quiet operation, and we did indeed have the same experience with this card, so I can happily say that it sits proudly with the other Direct-C U2 cards that we've had the opportunity to play with. Here's a cool feature for liquid coolers and tweakers, and just generally guys who are willing to push the limits of their hardware sort of no matter what the risk, by simply removing four screws on the back of the card, you can remove the entire Direct-C U2 cooler. This allows it to be cleaned or just completely removed and replaced with something else should you see fit, although most people probably aren't going to bother with that. You will have to break a seal in order to get the cooler off, however, that risk is entirely up to each individual user, and check that out. It comes apart just like that to reveal the way that the card is cooled. So we get thermal goop on the GPU itself, no thermal pads present on the memory, because of what I mentioned before, the way that the Direct-C U2 cooler provides so much airflow to the rest of the card, you don't really have to worry too much about that. We can see the entire 8 plus 2 phase power design, this is compared to, okay, so 8 plus 2 phase digital power design compared to the 5 plus 1 phase analog power design that you're going to find on a reference card and a dedicated heat sink for the MOSFETs themselves that allows that, that's the hottest part of the power delivery that allows them to stay cool. Now there's more to a custom PCB design than just designing the PCB, you also have to use higher quality components if you're going to get any benefit out of it whatsoever. So that's where ASUS' SAP or Super Alloy Power components come in. Most of the power delivery circuitry actually is comprised of these specially designed components that ASUS has engineered in order to deliver better overclocking, better efficiency, cooler operation, longer lifetime, and this is sort of, this hits pretty close to home for me, less coil wine, because coil wine is just annoying and then mind you, so are dead cards and cards that consume more power for no reason, but that was the rationale behind redesigning it in order to use their own components, it was to achieve all of those things. But how did it all work out in the end? My final word on this card is going to be about GPU tweak and the actual results that we were able to achieve because all of this is fine in theory, but what does it yield in the real world? Our DirectCU2 card overclocked higher than our reference card. Take that for what it is, this is a very small sampling, but in our experience, we did manage to get a slightly higher sustainable boost clock. Okay, so it was only 35 or so some odd megahertz higher than this particular card, but there you go, higher is higher and we did get better performance out of a DirectCU2 card than we did out of a reference card. Also using GPU tweak was a fairly good experience, I've never used it before, at least not extensively, but it does have some special features that allows it to work better with ASUS cards, particularly the ones that use their custom VRM designs that are pretty different from all the other things that are out there on the market and with the integrated GPU Z utility as well as the ability to set up monitoring as a widget, it's pretty handy. Thanks for checking out my unboxing and first look at the GTX 770 DirectCU2 from ASUS. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos.