Caporegime
ASUS Home Page - http://www.asus.com/ROG_ROG/ROG_STRIKERGTX760P4GD5/
OcUK Product Page - http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-342-AS&groupid=701&catid=1914&subcat=1830
Today I bring you ASUS own top of the range ROG Striker Platinum based on the Nvidia GTX760 GPU but using a fully custom designed PCB and cooler. The GPU core is binned for the best possible performance and overclocking headroom, yet out of the box this card has been designed to give 10% better performance than a reference GTX760 provides with a higher than core and boost speed already while remaining cooler and quieter.
Packaging and Accessories.
The rear of the box gives an exploded view of the cards makeup and specifications such as clock speeds and display outputs.
Under the lid is more information such as improved performance chart over a standard GTX760, information about the power circuitry and cooler.
Inside the box is another carton.
Inside this you will find the card and accessories which include,
• User installation manual and user guide.
• Driver and software disk.
• SLI bridge
• Molex to PCI-E power adapter.
The Card.
So here is the Striker Platinum resplendent in the ROG colours.
It is an odd shape and very wide due to the way the 10mm heatpipe juts out of the side and is covered by the shroud.
The rear of the card is finished with an aluminium back plate.
The card requires 8pin and 6pin PCI-E power connectors. Along side you can see voltage check points.
The power connectors have LEDs that illuminate red when no power is connected and green when powered correctly. Also note that the actual connectors have been rotated 180degrees to make it easier to fit and remove the power cables and their retaining clip.
Display connections consist of,
• Dual link DVI-I
• Dual link DVI-D (no analog signal at all)
• DisplayPort 1.2
• HDMI
With the cooler removed you can see how sparse the PCB is, it is a custom design compared to the reference Nvidia design.
This card features 8 power phases. The capacitors are high quality Japanese made Nichicon GT series with a 10K hour rated life span.
The chokes used are concrete core and hardened MOSFETS that are designed to withstand greater stress and heat.
SKHynix RAM is used and the part number is H5GQ2H24AFR and are rated at 6GHz, this card features 4GB of GDDR5 with 8 modules on each side of the card.
This is the Nvidia GK104 Kepler based core and is binned by ASUS for these cards.
• 1152 Shader Processors.
• 96 Texture units.
• 1085MHz base and 1150MHz boost clock speeds.
• 256Bit memory interface given a memory bandwidth of 192GB/s
The Cooler.
The cooler is based on the DirectCU II design and features two 90mm fans, one of which features inner radial style and outer flower style fan blades for multi-directional air flow.
The heatsink use three heatpipes the biggest of which is 10mm.
These heatpipes are ground perfectly flat and make direct contact with the GPU core.
As previously mentioned there are LEDs that illuminate on both power connectors when fitted and also a red ROG swoosh when the card is running, the ROG logo on the side of the card changes colour depending on the load.
• Blue for light load
• Orange for medium load
• Red for heavy load.
Overclocking.
The Striker Platinum comes with ASUS own tuning utility called GPU Tweak which offers Boost+Memory speed, Power target, Temperature target and GPU core voltage adjustment as well as monitoring.
But as I am more use to Afterburner I decided to stick with what I know. Using Afterburner I managed to get the Striker Platinum to a Boost speed of 1333MHz and a quite frankly ridiculous 8000MHz on the RAM! I actually ran out of slider in Afterburner and could not increase the RAM anymore. There where no artifacts or other geometry errors on screen at these settings during testing.
The binning process and quality of the cards design really shines through.
Temperatures and noise.
Below is a short video showing me moving the fan control slider in Afterburner and recording the fan noise,
In auto mode which is all that is needed even when overclocked the card remains silent it never seems to ramp up the fan rpm and I am also happy to report there is no coil whine.
Below are the peak core temperatures recorded by GPU-Z while running a full test of the new 3Dmark.
The ambient temperature of the room is pretty steady at 21.9/22C
Test setup.
I used the latest drivers available at the time from Nvidia which are 337.88 and no adjustments were made to the Nvidia control panel.
Synthetic benchmarks.
Programs used,
Game tests.
Games used,
Conclusion.
In summing up my experience of the ASUS Striker Platinum has been good, the Nvidia drivers are solid, it offers strong gaming performance at 1920X1080 resolution in the games I tried and it never struggled or stuttered. The cooler is extremely quiet during normal use or when overlcocked with auto fan control being all that is needed to keep temperatures in check.
ASUS has designed a really good card overall that offers undeniable overclocking performance with a binned GPU core and RAM that went literally off the scale and I am sure there was more to come if I was not limited by the overclocking software I used.
But, at £239 it has to deal the AMDs R9 280X and that is a step too far for it to match (unless you do what I did which is to overclock it to crazy heights) especially at 2560X1440 where its 4GB of Vram still doesn't help it deliver a smooth experience unless you are prepared to reduce in game settings and I can only assume it is being held back by the 256bit memory interface and also being based on a lower end GPU core with reduced shader processors and ROPs when compared to a more fully fledged GPU.
Pros.
• Well designed custom PCB and cooler.
• Good performance at 1920X1080.
• Overclocking daemon.
• 3 year warranty.
Cons.
• Price.
• 2560X1440 performance not great unless you heavily overclock.
• R9 280X is too much competition.
Thanks to ASUS UK for this sample.
Asus GeForce GTX 760 Striker 4096MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £239.99
The ASUS Republic of Gamers (ROG) Striker GTX 760 Platinum is a brand-new 4GB gaming graphics card powered by the sweet-spot NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX™ 760 graphics-processing unit (GPU), 4GB of high-speed GDDR5 memory and engineered with exclusive cooling and power-stabilizing technologies - delivering performance that's up to 10% faster than reference. Striker GTX 760 Platinum's DirectCU II cooling, CoolTech fan, DIGI+ voltage-regulator module (VRM) and Super Alloy Power components ensure cooler, faster, quieter gaming that also provides great overclocking potential. Sporting ROG's signature red-and-black livery and the color-coded load LED, Striker GTX 760 Platinum delivers superb out-of-the-box gaming experiences in style.
Specification
- Core Clock: 1085MHz (GK104)
- Core Boost Clock: 1150MHz
- Memory: 4096MB GDDR5
- Memory Clock: 6008MHz (Effective)
- Memory Interface: 256-Bit
- Processing Cores: 1152
- Bus Type: PCI-Express GEN 3.0 (Backwards compatible)
- Display Connectors: 2x Dual-Link DVI-I, 1x HDMI 1.4a & 1x Displayport
- SLI Ready (Upto 3-Way SLI Supported)
- HDCP Capable
- DirectX 11 Support
- OpenGL 4.0 Support
- PhysX Enabled
- CUDA Enabled
- 3D Vision Enabled
- NVIDIA Surround Enabled
- Warranty: 3 Years
Only £239.99 inc VAT.
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