 The Cooler Master Glacier 240L CPU cooler delivers the convenience of an all-in-one and the performance of a custom water cooler. Click now to learn more. Now the last time I reviewed a hybrid air slash water-cooled graphics card was back in 2007 when I was doing some guest writing for HardwareConucks.com under the pseudonym Missa Prostal and I reviewed the Cooler Master Hydra 8800. Since then both I and the concept of developing a heatsink that also works well as a water block have grown up quite a bit with Asus leading the charge in a big way with several of their recent ROG series motherboards featuring hybrid-cooled designs that allow the end user to choose whether they want air cooling or water cooling. Now the first reaction to a hybrid design that you can use either way from a purest perspective is, well then it probably sucks at both. And in many cases that's probably right, but let's take a closer look at Asus' Poseidon GTX 780 before we finish judging it, eh? Alright, so it comes clocked at a bog standard 1006 MHz boost clock with a bog standard, 3 gigs of RAM, and support for all the usual Nvidia technologies including G-Sync, CUDA, SLI, PhysX, GameStream, GeForce Experience with ShadowPlay, and future DirectX 12 support. But like many non-referenced cards, the differentiation point of this guy right here is in the attention to detail given to it by the board maker. The card features a 10-phase power design with Asus' premium DigiPlus VRM and better componentry including their super alloy power phases which promise longer lifetime, cooler operation, better overclocking, and no coil whine. On the front we find a couple of 90mm fans with Asus' dust proof design that keeps dust out of the bearings for a longer lifespan. Other than the slightly more aggressive ROG themed shroud though, there's really not much to indicate here that this is a thinly disguised wolf under the sheep's clothing. On to I.O. We've got two DVI ports, an HDMI port, and a DisplayPort port allowing up to three monitors and Nvidia surround with an additional auxiliary display. And the SLI connectors at the top support two, three, and four-way SLI configurations. At the bottom of the card the PCIe connector is a 16x Gen 3 connector, but it's not until we get around to the back here that things start to get interesting. That brushed aluminum backplate marginally improves cooling but more importantly looks absolutely beast, and the illuminated ROG logo on the top won't hurt matters either. Then what's this? Bam! Sh** just got real. Industry standard G1 quarter barb sockets. Looks like ASUS has learned a thing or two from their years of integrating water cooling on motherboards. Standards are there for a reason. They improve compatibility and even allow us to put sexy red right angle fittings from bits power on this beast. Finishing up on the outside of the card we've got an inverted 6-pin and 8-pin power connector. And I hope they start doing this on all of their cards. It actually makes me wonder why I accepted the terrible ergonomics of the standard connectors. Pressing the clip with my thumb is much easier than pressing it with my index finger flipped around the other way. That's a really cool idea. Alright, so now let's talk about what's under the hood of what ASUS calls a DirectCUH2O cooler. Its vapor chamber and water channel design is in my mind the most innovative thing about this card and where the performance you're going to see later really comes from. A vapor chamber is basically a pancake shaped heat pipe that spreads heat out across its surface. They're expensive to begin with and one with an embedded water channel in it must have cost a fortune to design and implement. But it's a great solution to the problem that Cooler Master had all those years ago. How do you get water close to the heat being given off by the GPU core without seriously hurting the performance of your air cooling solution for the customers who aren't using water yet? Cooler Master just put a water channel next to a heat pipe but that's not a lot of contact area for heat exchange and this is a much more elegant solution. Is it perfect? No. It'll be more restrictive than a normal full cover block but it gives the user the flexibility to go air now and water later without spending a bunch and still realizing a big part of the performance boost that you can get by switching to liquid cooling. To help the vapor chamber, Asus put three additional heat pipes between it and the more distant parts of the aluminum fin array. This helps carry some heat out to the second fan which with some help from the large die cast unisink that's sitting on the top of the card here cools the VRM area as well as helping out with the GPU. Now, I hate to do this to you guys but before I hand off to Luke I have a sponsor message for you, one that you might actually be very interested in. This right here my friends is the Lobera Ultimate from Tesoro. It's a fully mechanical keyboard using whichever flavor of Kailh switches you prefer with almost the entire keyboard being programmable with remapped keys or macros, some handy thumb macro buttons below the space bar, media keys, built-in USB hub and audio pass-through and onboard memory with support for up to five profiles but watch this shiz because it's about to get crazy up in here. Hold on a second, hold on a second. Whoa. Did I just blow your mind? Because this mechanical keyboard also has individual key RGB backlighting that can vary in brightness, pulse and I mean who cares what else it does? It's a solidly built RGB backlit mechanical keyboard only the second one I've ever laid eyes on and the first one you can actually buy with full RGB backlighting. Look at me changing profiles. I'm all up in my profile changing biz. I can dance all day, I can dance all day. Anyway check out the link in the video description to check out pricing and maybe pick one up. I recommend using the six key rollover mode for optimal compatibility and the included extra USB plug to get up to two and a half amps of power to your USB hub for faster phone charging and better operation with whatever power hungry peripherals you might be using. Alright so the wait's over. Over to Luke for some sexy and provocative graphics card results. Alright guys welcome to the performance review of our 780 Poseidon. This card as you know is both air and water cooled capable so when you're looking at the dock remember to look at both the air and water cooled rows for this card as the core clock speeds are definitely different. In terms of platform we had to change things up a little bit as we're water cooling this card so we wanted it to be on the same bench as all the other cards that we're testing. So in terms of CPU we're running a 3770K and in terms of RAM we're running 8 gigs of RAM at 1600 megahertz and then as you know the GPUs vary and you can see all of their clock speeds again in the overclocking dock linked below this video. In terms of tips for overclocking there isn't a ton to say. This wasn't a super complicated card to overclock although one thing that stood out a lot was how much GPU boost can skew things. The second you put this card on water it's immediately a lot better and you can play with it a little bit more as you'll have more headroom thermally even if you have your thermal cap set at 95 degrees and you're not getting anywhere close to there. My load temperatures for this card under air were about 77 and then with a thermal cap of 95 and then when I went to water load went down to about 45 but then I had a lot more headroom to play with which is kind of funky. GPU boost can do that so just remember that if you're overclocking this card. In terms of performance it did really well it's a higher binned card than a reference card you'll see so it's just usually automatically better and then also under water it gains more performance there. One thing that's really nice about this card is the versatility of both because I was able to take this air cool it benchmark it like that strap two tubes to it test it under water it worked perfectly fine and then go right back to air and there was no real issues. One thing to note if you're going to do that is to drain the card before you go back to air as you don't want any pressure problems with that water heating up in the closed system once those plugs are screwed on. Either way guys that's about it thank you for watching this video on the 780 Platinum. If you want to see all of our Linus Tech Tips video be sure to subscribe right here on YouTube and comment below if you have anything interesting to say about this air water hybrid cooling setup like dislike favorite share all that fancy stuff and if you want to go to the forum to comment because there's usually a better discussion going on there and you don't like the ads that are on the forum be sure to contribute and then that's about it. Thank you guys for watching and I'll see you next time.