ASUS Radeon HD 7790 DirectCU II OC Overclocked Video Card Review

Introduction

While ASUS is a name we hear quite a bit here at TweakTown, it's been a while since the name has been used in reference to a video card. That changes today with the new ASUS HD 7790 DirectCU II OC that we have on hand. With AMD and NVIDIA both releasing new mid-range models that are really heating up that mid-$100 range, we're seeing a bunch of new mid-range offerings in for testing.

While from the AMD side we've already looked at retail versions of the new HD 7790 from Sapphire and GIGABYTE models, we've only looked at the GTX 650 Ti Boost in its reference form.

We've got some retail offerings of the GTX 650 Ti Boost in for testing, but today we're going to be looking at the ASUS HD 7790 DirectCU II OC. The formula as always will be very standard with us starting with the package. Once we've done that we'll move onto the card itself.

From the card we'll move onto the specifications side of things, and like the GIGABYTE card we looked at the other day, we've again decided to overclock this ASUS offering due to the fact that the out of the box clock speeds are very similar to that of the Sapphire model we reviewed earlier. We'll quickly cover the testbed, the cards that are in our graphs today and then get stuck straight into the performance to see just what we're able to get out of the ASUS HD 7790 DirectCU II OC.

Package

Checking out the front of the box you can see the main information you'd expect with the model, amount of memory, the fact it's an OC model and some information about the cooler.

The back of the box expands on some of the main features, which includes the DirectCU II cooler. On the left hand side you can also see a picture of the card and a rundown of the connectivity.

Moving inside there's not a whole lot to the bundle. We've got the standard setup guide along with a CD which includes the driver and the GPU Tweak software. You can also see we've got a DVI to VGA connector and a CrossFire bridge to round things out.