- Date:
- Monday , October 21, 2013
- Author:
- David Schroth
- Editor:
- Brent Justice
- Share:

ASUS GeForce GTX 760 DirectCU II OC Video Card Review
If you are in the market for a new video card with a budget around $250 you have two deals to chose between. The ASUS GeForce GTX 760 DirectCU II OC, or the Radeon HD 7950 Boost. Which one will really give you the best gameplay experience for that $250, we pit the two together, overclocking comparisons from both included.
Overclocking the ASUS GeForce GTX 760 DirectCU II OC
Throughout this evaluation we will be using our highest stable overclock after voltage tweaking as a third video card in the evaluation, in order to express the full potential and amount of performance that the ASUS GeForce GTX 760 DirectCU II OC Video Card has in store.
The procedure followed for overclocking a Kepler based video card is different from traditional overclocking. First we increase Power Target to the highest amount which increases the cards TDP, much like AMD's PowerTune. After this we simply increase the GPU Boost Clock until performance diminishes, and then backed it off slowly until performance stabilized. You can read more about this procedure in our NVIDIA Kepler GeForce GTX 680 Overclocking Review.
Please remember that every video card is different and the overclocks we achieve here are not necessarily what you will be able to achieve.
To overclock the ASUS GeForce GTX 760 DirectCU II OC we used ASUS’s GPUTweak.
Overclocking with the ASUS GeForce GTX 760 DirectCU II OC


The first screenshot of GPU-z is the out-of-box ASUS GeForce GTX 760 DirectCU II OC at its stock speeds and the second screenshot is of ASUS’s GPUTweak at stock speeds.
A reference GeForce GTX 760 has a base clock of 980MHz, a boost frequency of 1033MHz and a memory frequency of 6GHz. The ASUS GeForce GTX 760 DirectCU II OC ships with a factory overclock of 26MHz on the base clock and 39MHz on the boost clock pushing it to a total of 1006MHz and 1072MHz on the base and boost clocks respectively. The memory check in at reference speed at 6.008GHz GDDR5 effective rate. In our stock testing, we observed the effective boost clock on the card to be 1137MHz.
For our overclocking efforts, we set the power limit to +5% (the maximum allowed), the voltage to +12mV and spun up the fans to 100% and started to dial up the clock speeds. We began by adjusting the boost clock within GPU Tweak until we began experiencing instability (note that GPU Tweak allows modification of the boost clock that indirectly changes the base clock, where as other tools allow the base clock to be tweaked instead.)
We were able to do some gaming with a boost clock of 1242MHz which resulted in an observed GPU clock of 1347MHz, however it was quite unstable in several games within our suite of games. We backed down until we found that a boost clock setting of 1192MHz allowed for rock solid stability across all games in the evaluation. This resulted in an observed GPU clock of 1254MHz, a 117MHz increase in GPU speed.
After the GPU overclock was set, we began increasing the memory speed until stability was lost. Some of our games were able to run with memory at an effective rate of 6.5GHz, however, backing down to 6.4GHz allowed for full stability, leaving us with an effective 400MHz overclock on the memory.
The final overclock of the ASUS GeForce GTX 760 DirectCU II OC achieved an observed GPU clock increase of 117MHz and a memory increase of 400MHz GDDR5 effective rate.

Temperatures remained unchanged during the evaluation due to ASUS’s DirectCU II cooling system.
Below is a screenshot of ASUS’s GPU Tweak and GPUz after achieving our maximum stable overclock, which will be used as the operating frequency through the rest of the evaluation as a third video card.
