 The Corsair Carbide Air 540 High Airflow Cube Case is great for air cooling or liquid cooling. Check the link in the video description to learn more. Welcome to my unboxing and overview of the GeForce GTX 780 DirectCU2 OC from Asus. So let's go ahead and see what they have to say for themselves on the front of the box anyway. It's a great air cooler, vastly quieter, and this we believe because like the last Asus card overview we did, we have already taken it out of the box and we've already run it through the paces. So yes, we believe it. OC edition, okay, it's not overclocked much, but the advantage isn't necessarily in the factory overclock, but rather in the fact that because of the design of this particular card it runs more efficiently and runs cooler, which allows GPU boost 2.0, which remember reacts not only to power thresholds as well as clock speed, but also to temperature. So it allows GPU boost 2.0 to dynamically increase the clock speed of this graphics card. It's using a fully custom PCB, so that includes their DigiPlus power, so that's their VRM design, as well as their SAP components, so super alloy power components. This gives effectively better overclocking when you use their GPU tweaked software, which works with any Asus graphics card, particularly this one, because we found it works very, very well. So one of the things that Asus has done with this card is they have moved away from something that's been a bit of a staple for them. Whoa, that was fun. And that is the triple slot design of their very high end cards. This is a dual slot card, but hold on, I'm getting ahead of myself. It comes with an SLI bridge. It comes with a dual six pin to eight pin adapter, and it comes with their GPU tweak and driver, which you should ignore and download the latest off Nvidia.com and Asus's own website as well as a quick start guide. So let's look at the card physically. Now it'll be obvious to anyone who's seen a reference 780 that this isn't one, but let's go through a few of the things that make it non-reference. Number one, it has a backplate. So this backplate doesn't contribute much to cooling, let's be honest with ourselves, but what it does do is it looks cool and other than that, it prevents sagging. So it actually makes the card more rigid and less likely to floop down like we've seen with heavy graphics cards in the past. Now I mentioned already the dual fan configuration and dual slot configuration, but there are some other special things about it. So number one is check this out. This is their new cool tech fan design. So instead of just being focused on blowing air down into the heat sink fins, you can see Asus has built up the cooler around the outside edges of the fan. So you can see there are aluminum fins here and yeah. And this fan is designed to not only blow down, but also out. So that means you're able to make better use of the heat sink fins that are all around the fan. Now the secondary cooling fan, the one that doesn't sit directly over top of the GPU, uses their more traditional style. Now the cooler itself in order to even get any benefit from more air flow, okay, any cooling can get benefit from more air flow, whatever. I'm trying to segue here. All right. So the cooler itself has another unique feature. Check this out. That right there, my friends, is a 10 millimeter heat pipe. This is the largest I have ever seen on a graphics card. MSI's old super pipe marketing that I don't really see them using much anymore referred to eight millimeter heat pipes of which this card has two. So there are two eight millimeter heat pipes, one 10 millimeter heat pipe, and then it looks like two six millimeter heat pipes. So there are five total heat pipes carrying heat away from the GPU core to the massive cooler on the rest of this card. Now speaking of massive coolers, there is a very, very, very small PCB extension right here, but it doesn't add a significant amount of overall length to the card. Not like we see with cards like the GTX seven or the GTX six 70 where it has like a massive plastic overhang that isn't actually part of the components. There are led indicators for the PCI express lot so you can actually diagnose if there's any kind of a power delivery issue with the board itself and it has full support for VGA hot wire. So this right here is a PCI express three point interface, nothing to do with VGA hot wire except that if you put that interface into a supported ASUS motherboard, generally speaking it's their ROG boards, you can actually over a volt the GPU and various components on the video card in ways that Nvidia never really intended. ASUS doesn't advertise this feature on their boxes because Nvidia doesn't like it, but there you go. The feature is there. I have confirmed it. It is supported. Now speaking of supported features, it's got support for 3D vision surround with two HDMI outputs, two HDMI outputs, an HDMI output and a display port output. You're going to get a little bit of exhaust out the back of the case, but generally speaking this is an internal exhaust card. So you're going to want to make sure you have good case airflow. It has two SLI connectors with full support for Nvidia SLI up to three or even four way. However, four way just really isn't that recommended these days. At the back of the card, you've got two PCI Express connectors. One of them is a six pin and one of them is an eight pin. And then other than that, that's it for connectivity. What more did you guys really want? Were you expecting it to have like, you know, an anchor port so that you could actually use it as an anchor because it's quite heavy. And there's a good reason for that because in terms of the actual overall heat sink mass available for dissipating heat, this thing has about double what a stock GTX 780 does. Now we were a little bit worried about the complexity of removing the graphics card cooler from this card, but part of what ASUS, I mean, just looking at all these little screws that it seems like we can access, but part of what ASUS takes pride in with their direct CU cards is this. Easy disassembly, four screws on the back of the GPU right there. And that reveals the direct contact copper heat pipe. So you can actually see the nickel plating isn't even on this part, direct copper to GPU. And you can see that 10 millimeter heat pipe, those two eight millimeter heat pipes, as well as those two six mil heat pipes, all branching out to various parts of the cooler itself here. All right. So you can see why that primary fan is considered the primary fan as well, because most of where ASUS is carrying the heat. So that 10 mil pipe is right here under the primary fan. This eight and this six mil are sitting right under the primary fan as well as any heat that is carried through conduction directly by this block of copper and aluminum here will sit directly under that fan as well. So the secondary one is only really getting some of the 10 mils heat as well as one six and one eight, both of which are carrying heat quite far away from the GPU, which does reduce their effectiveness. Now that we've got the cooler off, we can also see part of what makes this card tick. Now this is an overclocked card. A reference GTX 780 only gets a clock speed of around 863 slash 900 for boost. And this one's at 889, 941. However, there's more to it than that because of, so here's a VRM heatsink as well as their super alloy power components. But the advantage that this card gets is because it's more efficient and stays within its power limits more effectively, it actually is able to achieve around 1032 megahertz typical boost clock on average from what ASUS has seen without any overclocking. That means even at stock speeds, this card should be faster than what they're really saying about it on the box, which is very, very cool. Let's go ahead and show you the rest of the components that are on the PCB itself. First of all, matte PCB. So ASUS, two thumbs up. Good job guys. You guys rock. Three gigs of six gigabyte, six gig, six, three gigs, not six gigs. I was, I had Titan on the brain there. Three gigs of six gigahertz GDDR5 memory. So that's pretty much the same as any other GTX 780. However, it is also getting the benefit of their digital power delivery in much the same way that the GPU itself does. So I think that pretty much wraps it up, except what does all this mean in the real world? I just gave you a whole bunch of ASUS marketing speak, but does this card actually overclock better than a reference card? Boom, here's a couple of graphs. So in our experience, yes, we were actually able to overclock the DirectCU2 card better than we were able to overclock our reference card. Your mileage may vary. It's possible we got a fantastic DirectCU2, although ASUS tells us ours is pretty average. It's possible that we got a bunk GTX 780 reference card. However, when Nvidia cedes those cards to reviewers, I don't think they pick all the bunk ones to send to reviewers. So take it with a grain of salt, but that's what we think about it. Give us a comment under the video. What do you, here's what I want to know. What do you think ASUS could have improved about the GTX 780 DirectCU2? For me, they've addressed the triple slot issue, which was a problem for me. They've, I mean, yeah. Okay. What could be improved? Also like the video guys, share the video. 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