ASUS GeForce GTX 680 & GTX 670 DirectCU II Top Edition Video Card Reviews

Overclocking

To overclock the GeForce GTX 600 series cards we used ASUS GPU Tweak version 2.2.8.1. This is a great overclocking utility that allows you to adjust the GPU boost clock, memory clock, and fan speed with the default settings. If you want to enabled advanced features you can enable adjustment of the GPU voltage and the power target range.

We overclocked the ASUS GeForce GTX 670 DirectCU II Top edition card first and had a heck of a time getting the card to overclock much. The defaults speeds on this card are a base clock of 1059MHz and a boost clock of 1137MH. We were able to get a 33MHz boost on the core and 392MHz on the memory. To help boost game performance and benchmark results we found that increased the power target to 117% helped. With these settings the ASUS GeForce GTX 670 DirectCU II Top edition card reached 1305MHz according to the utilities built-in monitor.

Let’s take a look at some Futuremark 3DMark11 on the performance preset to see how the overclock helped performance.

ASUS GeForce GTX 670 DirectCU II Top at 1059MHz core and 1502MHz memory:

ASUS GeForce GTX 670 DirectCU II Top at 1092MHz core and 1600MHz memory:

We tried out this overclock with Futuremark 3DMark 11 on the performance preset and saw the score go from P10117 to P10465, so this is a 3.4% improvement over the reference speeds! Not the greatest overclock in the world, but anything higher on the core clock offset and the driver would crash when running benchmarks or playing games.

Now let’s see what the ASUS GeForce GTX 680 DirectCU II Top edition card!

After overclocking the ASUS GeForce GTX 670 DirectCU II and finding that we didn’t have an overclocking champion we were not sure what would happen with the Geforce GTX 680 DirectCU II Top edition card, but we were happy to find out that it was a much better overclocker. We were able to increase the base clock from 1137MHz to 1238MHz, which is a 101MHz increase in clock frequency. The GPU Tweak utility showed that the core was boosting up to 1410MHz! We were also able to bump up the memory 400MHz before the GDDR5s error correction came into play at over 6400MHz.

ASUS GeForce GTX 680 DirectCU II Top at 1137MHz core and 1502MHz memory:

ASUS GeForce GTX 680 DirectCU II Top at 1238MHz core and 1602MHz memory:

We tried out this overclock with Futuremark 3DMark 11 on the performance preset and saw the score go from P11191 to P11847, so this is a 5.9% improvement over the default benchmark results. .

Overclocking the cards was very easy to do and we saw a nice 3-6% performance improvement by doing so. The ASUS GPU Tweak utility was found to be easy to use, so we highly suggest giving overclocking a try if you get one of these cards to get the most gaming performance possible out of it!