Cooling and noise production
After two runs of Metro 2033 the ASUS GTX680 DirectCU II Top's GPU is 54 degrees according to the drivers. It proves that the DirectCU cooler performs well, because the reference cards went up to 74 degrees. It's a difference of 20 degrees while it's clocked 13 percent higher, an impressive feat.
The much-improved cooling luckily does not automatically result in more noise. At a distance of 10 cm we measured 40.9 dB(A), a level comparable with the reference cooler that caused 40.5 dB(A) of noise. You can definitely hear 40 dB(A), but it's still silent.
