Overclocking
The ASUS GTX680 DirectCU II Top's cooler manages to keep the GPU 20 degrees cooler at a 13 percent higher clock frequency, which sounds very promising for the overclocking potential. If we look back at our original GeForce GTX 680 review, we see that we were able to get the GPU on the reference card to 1126 MHz and the memory to 1827 MHz.
The ASUS card looks like it should have more overclocking capacity for the GPU, and less so for the memory. With a Core i7 3960X overclocked at 4.8 GHz we achieved a 3DMark Vantage score of 42311 points with the GPU at 1207 MHz and the memory at 1752 MHz. With the reference card we achieved 41,574 points.
In 3DMark11 we reached 11820 points with the ASUS card. In this benchmark we got the GPU to run stable at 1217 MHz and the memory at 1752 MHz. The reference card got 11304 points.
