ASUS GeForce GTX 780 Poseidon Platinum (air) Review

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Published by Christian Ney on 08.01.14 (50616 reads)

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With the new GeForce GTX 780 Poseidon Platinum, ASUS introduced a very interesting and unique product into market. A graphics card that can be chilled with air, water or both at the same time thanks to ASUS' brand new innovative hybrid DirectCU H2O cooler. Very promising on the paper we are going to have a first look at it.

Presentation

ASUS ROG is at it again, after a unique dual GPU MARS 760 graphics card, the enthusiast branch of ASUS introduces a new graphics card featuring an exclusive DirectCU H2O hybrid - air and water - cooling solution. Other than a rather special cooler, the new ASUS GeForce GTX 780 Poseidon Platinum graphics card features a PCB with custom design and improved VRM area as well as a decent factory overclocking. Cooling solution aside, the new GeForce GTX 780 Poseidon Platinum shares a lot of similarities with the GTX 780 DirectCU II series.

As you can see from the above picture, the Poseidon Platinum uses the new B1 revision of the GK110 chip. Therefore it was a simple decision to go for higher factory overclocking than on the DirectCU II OC model but the manufacturer didn't push things too far and decided to go for an average factory-overclocking on the new Poseidon Platinum. While the reference GeForce GTX 780 GPU is set to work at 863MHz for the base clock and 900MHz for the Boost clock, the new ASUS GTX 780 Poseidon Platinum works at 954 MHz for the base clock and 1'006 MHz for the Boost clock.

Unfortunately, no factory overclocking was done on the 3GB of GDDR5 memory that remains at recommended 1'500 MHz (6'000 MHz effective).

While the typical Boost clock is set at 1'006 MHz, the maximum Boost of 1'084 (1.127v) MHz was achieved quite easily and the GTX 780 Poseidon Platinum held that clock most of the load time due to good custom cooler as well as good TDP target (Nvidia's Boost technology being based on both temperature and power on this card, the latter being predominant). The GPU Max. Boost clock only dropped in Furmark down to 927 MHz at 0.965v because of the power target and even the temperature went past 80°C. We did not experience any throttling in the games tested games, the GPU was always running at 1'084 MHz, almost 80 MHz above the advertised Boost clock.

Specifications

	Gigabyte 780 GHz	ASUS 780 Poseidon P	Gigabyte 780 OC V2	GeForce GTX 780
Chip	GK110-300-B1	GK110-300-B1	GK110-300-A1	GK110-300-A1
Process	28 nm	28 nm	28 nm	28 nm
Transistors	7.10 billion	7.10 billion	7.10 billion	7.10 billion
GPU clock	1'020 MHz	954 MHz	954 MHz	863 MHz
GPU Boost clock	1'072 MHz	1'006 MHz	1'006 MHz	900 MHz
Memory GDDR5	3'072 MB	3'072 MB	3'072 MB	3'072 MB
Memory clock	1'502 (6'008) MHz	1'502 (6'008) MHz	1'502 (6'008) MHz	1'502 (6'008) MHz
Memory interface	384 Bit	384 Bit	384 Bit	384 Bit
Memory bandwidth	288'400 MB/s	288'400 MB/s	288'400 MB/s	288'400 MB/s
Shader Cores	2'304 (12 SMX)	2'304 (12 SMX)	2'304 (12 SMX)	2'304 (12 SMX)
TMUs	192	192	192	192
ROPs	48	48	48	48
TDP	xxx Watt	xxx Watt	>250 Watt	250 Watt
PCB Type	Custom Design	Custom Design	Custom Design	Reference Design
Lenght (PCB - Total)	26.9 - 28.8 cm	26.9 - 28.1 cm	26.9 - 28.8 cm	27.0 - 27.0 cm
Height (PCB - Total)	11.0 - 12.9 cm	12.0 - 13.6 cm	11.0 - 12.9 cm	11.0 - 11.0 cm
Slots	2	2	2	2
Cooler	WindForce 3X 450W	DirectCU H2O	WindForce 3X 450W	NVIDIA Reference
Launch Price	$XXX	$XXX	$XXX	$649