ASUS GTX760-DC2OC-2GD5 Review

ASUS is known for customised cards with its DirectCU II moniker which is a factory overclocked card out of the box. With the GTX 760 addressing those looking at a comparatively affordable card as compared to the higher end GTX 780 and GTX 770, the ASUS customisation is sure to add some performance boost. The reference NVIDIA GTX 760 is the cheapest GTX 700 series card so far. But will the ASUS GTX 760 DC2-OC offer a better value proposition despite the higher price?

Design and Build Quality

ASUS GTX 760 DC2 sports a metallic shroud with red accents

Considering this is a custom card from ASUS, we are presented with a great looking card as opposed to the boring black plastic shrouded reference design of the NVIDIA GTX 760. The ASUS GTX 760 DC2-OC has an open card design, with the black metallic shroud having red accents going from the edges at the far left to the center at the right hand edge. There are two circular holes on this shroud to make provisions for two fans. This metallic shroud is placed atop the passive heatsink which extends a good 3.5cm outside ahead of the PCB. Four copper pipes (two on each side of the GPU) are seen under the heatsink. The top portion of the card has an 8-pin power connector on the right hand side and two SLI connectors on the left. The overall build quality of the card is quite good and the metallic shroud ensures that there is no flexing, which is quite normal with plastic ones. The PCB on the rear side has no protective covering on it.

Features

The four heat-pipes are clearly visible under the metallic shroud

ASUS GTX 760 DC2-OC is based on the GK104 GPU and it’s a factory overclocked card taking the base clock to 1006MHz and Boost clock to 1072MHz - up from 980MHz and 1033MHz respectively. The other major difference is that the ASUS card has a single 8-pin power connector as opposed to two 6-pin ones seen on the reference card. It measures 8.6-inches which is still shorter than the 9.5-inches on the reference card. Other things are pretty much the same as the reference card: 1152 CUDA cores, 2GB GDDR5 memory, 256-bit memory interface, two DVI ports along with a DisplayPort and HDMI port and so on.

The ASUS GTX 760 DC2-OC has the same input ports as the reference GTX 760: two DVI, one DisplayPort and one HDMI port

ASUS has also bundled in a GPU Tweak utility which helps you to monitor the temperature, fan speed and voltage of the card. It also allows you to overclock the graphics card on the fly by adjusting the GPU boost clock and the memory clock. We took the boost clock to 1206MHz and memory clock to around 6058MHz.

Test Setup
Processor: Intel Core i7-4770K
Motherboard: ASRock Z87M Extreme4
RAM: 2 x 4GB GSkill RipjawsX
OS Drive: Intel SSD, 80GB
Source Drive: Kingston SSDNow, 120GB SSD
PSU: Cooler Master 800W Silent Pro Gold
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
Performance
Before we get into the gaming performance, a word on the card’s operating temperatures. In the idle mode we noted the temperature to be around 34 degrees C. The open shroud design ensures that the cards load temperatures are under 70 degrees which is great. Using the GPU Tweak utility, you can overclock the card on the fly and set as many as four profiles. We overclocked the card to a boost clock of 1206 MHz and memory clock of 6058MHz and got a performance jump of around 8-10 percent.
 

3DMark 11
3DMark is a computer benchmarking tool created and developed by Futuremark Corporation to determine the performance of a computer’s 3D graphic rendering and CPU workload processing capabilities. The latest version makes extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11, including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. We used the “Performance” preset for this benchmark.

Battlefield 3
Battlefield 3 is a first-person shooter video game developed by EA Digital Illusions CE and is based on the new Frostbite 2 game engine. The game only supports DX10 and DX11, which enables enhanced in-game destruction with Destruction 3.0, creating more refined physics than its predecessor and quasi-realtime radiosity using Geometrics’ Enlighten technology. The game is a visual treat and a nightmare for graphics cards, which makes it perfect for our test. We used the “Ultra High” preset, Post AA – High, Blur – Full, Field of View – 90, Level – “Fear no Evil”.

Crysis 2
Crysis 2 is a first-person shooter video game developed by Crytek and is based on the new CryEngine 3. Just like the first iteration of the game, Crysis 2 continues to be one of the best-looking shooters to date. The settings used for this benchmark were “Ultra and High” preset in Adrenalin, DX11 and High-resolution texture patch.

Dirt 3 
Dirt 3 is a rallying video game and the third in the Dirt series of the Colin McRae Rally series, developed and published by Codemasters. The game is extremely scalable and features DX11 tessellation effects. We used the built-in benchmark tool, along with “Ultra” quality preset.

Metro 2033
Metro 2033 is a first-person shooter video game that continues to bring even the toughest graphics cards down to their knees. The game has a lot of DX11 eye-candy, which really puts a strain on any GPU. All DX11 features were enabled for the benchmark and we used the “Tower” level for our test.

Verdict and Price in India
Considering most overclocked GTX 760s selling in the market are around the Rs 22,000 mark and over, the Rs 23,500 price point for the ASUS GTX 760 is quite competitive considering its build quality and performance. In most gaming benchmarks, we noted that the GTX 760 DC2-OC gave a performance at par and at times even better than last generation’s GTX 680 which is quite impressive considering that card still sells for over Rs 30,000. It reaches close to the GTX 770 in some games, but in most other games, the GTX 770 was a much better card. On the whole, the GTX 760 DC2-OC is a great card for someone with a sub-25k budget. If you want to keep the budget under Rs 20k, the stock GTX 760 is still a decent card.