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.

While 77 degrees is not that best load temperature you have to understand that Furmark stresses the GPU out more than most games or even benchmarking software would.  When benchmarking the card we did not see it go over 57 degrees.

Now let’s see if we can push this card.  This is my first time overclocking a card actually!  ASUS does include their GPU Tweak utility that allows your to monitor temperatures, fan speed, GPU clock and much more.  You can also change those values if you like.

You can easily use this software to overclock the card or use MSI’s Afterburner Utility.  The stock GPU clock is set at 925MHz.  I wanted to bump it up to 1000MHz to match ASUS’s own TOP version of this card.  So I went ahead and bumped the voltage up to 1200mV.  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.  So I moved the GPU clock up to 1000MHz and the Memory clock to 5600MHz (1400MHz effective).  I ran a stability test to make sure the overclock was stable and it was.  Moving up I went to 1100 for the GPU clock, but that was not as stable, so I had to move down ultimately ending up at 1075MHz for the GPU clock and 5800MHz (1450MHz) effective for the memory.

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