Air or liquid cooled—the choice is yours
Nobody would call the GeForce GTX 780 a particularly hot-running or noisy GPU, but that hasn’t stopped Asus from giving it the Poseidon treatment via a “hybrid” air-and-liquid cooling setup. It’s not a self-contained cooling system, but rather an integrated water block complete with copper vapor chambers that sits below an already-beefy DirectCU air cooler. This lets the card run just fine under its own air cooling, and lets you inject it into your liquid-cooling loop, as well. It’s able to do that care of two G1/4-inch tubes attached to the integrated water block that let you attach barbs in pretty much any size ranging from 1/2-inch ID to 1/4-inch ID, so you can easily add it to your existing setup.
The Poseidon’s integrated water block features copper vapor chambers and sits below a massive aluminum heatsink.
It’s a clever and cost-saving design, because if you’re rocking full-liquid, the alternative is to buy the GPU for $500, then the water block for $140 or so, then attach the block, and insert it into your loop. If you were already looking to upgrade your GPU, the Poseidon method would save you a lot of time and energy, and if you’re running a pre-Kepler GPU, it would be one hell of an upgrade.
The board itself is still a two-slot card despite the added cooling hardware, and it has the same 3GB of 6GHz GDDR5 memory as other GTX 780s. It comes out of the box with a healthy overclock too, with the base clock running at 954MHz compared to the stock speed of 863MHz, and a Boost Clock of 1,006MHz compared to 900MHz. The card also has a pulsating Republic of Gamers logo in red that matches the card’s aesthetic. It features an aluminum backplate for support, Digi+ VRM components, and a ROG edition of its tuning software named GPU Tweak.
For testing, we strapped the Poseidon to our GPU test bench and ran it though our tests, first on air and then on water. To test the liquid-cooled configuration, we dug out some parts we used on Dream Machine 2013, including the superb Swiftech MCP655 pump, several feet of 3/8-inch ID tubing, an XSPC 360mm radiator, and two Gentle Typhoon fans in a push-pull configuration. Sure, it’s a bit overkill, but we didn’t have a single 120mm radiator kit available for testing, so take the results with a grain of salt—we did use a huge radiator. In terms of performance, the Poseidon GTX 780 performed on par with the best GTX 780 cards we’ve tested, including the GHz edition from Gigabyte and the SC ACX model from EVGA, so it’s top of its class. Temps on air topped out at a respectable 73 C, and we hit 1,084MHz. Once we strapped the liquid-cooling apparatus to it, temps never rose above 44 C, and it was so quiet we had to put our ear right next to it, and even then we didn’t hear anything. It reminded us why we love liquid cooling so much, and the 29 C drop in temps over air were incredible.
Overall, this card kicks ass, but is made to satisfy a very small niche of the market. We’d never recommend it over a vanilla GTX 780, but if you are running liquid cooling and need to upgrade, it doesn’t get much better than this. We do have one big complaint, though, which is that the barbs stick straight out from the card rather than being at a 90-degree angle, so when you attach the tubing, they will stick straight out from the card, too, and cause clearance problems with a case door. We ran ours with the case door removed since it was just a quick setup for testing, but long-term, we can see this being an issue unless you also use right-angle connectors. In our opinion, though, they should be built into the card. This omission is big enough that we are taking away the Kick Ass award this time; otherwise, this card is hard to fault.
$600,www.asus.com
