ASUS GeForce GTX 660 DirectCU II OC Edition Video Card Review

Temperatures & Overclocking
ASUS has outfitted this card with their DirectCU II cooling system so how does it perform?  To test cooling performance we used Furmark to put a full load on the GPU.  Temperature was recorded in the Furmark program as well as in GPU-Z.  The fan speed was set to auto and not changed as that is what most people will have it running on by default.

temps

As you can see this card is much cooler than the ASUS HD 7970 DirectCU II, which we reviewed a little bit ago.  As we test more graphics cards we will add them to this graph.

Now let’s see if we can push this card.  This is my first time overclocking a 600 series NVIDIA card!  We do have a great step by step guide on overclocking NVIDIA 600 series cards.  I suggest that if you are new at overclocking you follow this guide.  ASUS does include their GPU Tweak utility that allows your to monitor temperatures, fan speed, GPU clock and much more.  If you go into the advanced settings you can custom tune the fan curve, save profiles, have linked voltage to frequency adjustment and setup extensive monitoring and logging.

ss1

You can easily use this software to overclock the card or use MSI’s Afterburner Utility.  The stock GPU clock is set at 1020 MHz, which is already overclocked from the stock 980 MHz.  I started to bump up the GPU clock, memory clock and voltage.  When moving your voltage up from the stock voltage settings you want to keep an eye on the GPU temperature as increasing the voltage will cause the card to run hotter.  I settled on a 1100 MHz (1165 MHz boost) and 1600 MHz memory.  I ran a stability test to make sure the overclock was stable and it was.  Not bad to get more out of a card that is already overclocked!

oc1

I have added some benchmarks below of the card running at its overclocked settings.

3dmark11 oc

3dmarkv oc

lp2 oc

crysis2 oc

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