Now that we have taken a look at the GTX 760 from Nvidia, which of course means it is time to see what some of the other manufactures have done with their GTX 760 designs. First up is a look at a card from EVGA called the GTX 760 Superclocked w/ACX. Some of you might remember the GTX 770 ACX that we recently took a look at, this is very similar. Hopefully the performance that we saw with the GTX 770 ACX will be similar to the GTX 760 ACX; if that is the case we should be very happy with the card. Of course there is only one way to find out, read on to see.

Product Name: EVGA GTX 760 Superclocked w/ACX

Review Sample Provided by: EVGA

Written by: Wes

Pictures by: Wes

Packaging

The packaging for the EVGA GTX 760 Superclocked w/ACX is basically the same as what we saw with their GTX 770 ACX. The front of the box has the EVGA logo in large letters and the typical GTX 760 logo on the right side. They did slip a little important info on the front as well with a logo showing that the card is capable of running in 3 way SLI, this way you can just pick up two more while you are in the store. On the flip side of the packaging we have a full feature list and a list of everything you will find inside of the box. There is also a photo of the actual card as well as a photo of the rear connections so anyone picking it up will know if their monitors will work with the GTX 760 Superclocked w/ACX.

Inside we have a user manual, a few different notices and warnings. Along with those you get the drive disk that also has a nice metal case badge tucked away inside. You also get two of the EVGA enthusiast built stickers for you to stick around your office. 

Game of Throne and EVGA fans will both love the Game of Pwns posters that come with the card as well.

Accessories also include a dual six pin to 8 pin cable, a dual Molex to 6 pin and also a DVI to VGA adapter. The dual six pin to 8 pin cable is especially interesting because EVGA has gone a step farther and sleeved it all individually in all black to give it a little extra style.

Card Layout and Photos

The GTX 770 ACX that I took a look at recently was my first experience with EVGA’s new ACX designs. After getting it on the test bench I was extremely impressed, my only complaint at the time was that I was also very fond of the GTX 770’s all metal fan shroud as well. Well here on the GTX 760 that isn’t a worry at all. Going from the reference GTX 760 to this card its night and day aesthetically. As a car guy the design reminds me of an all blacked out car with large rims. Everything on the card is black other than the metal trimming along the top edge and on the side where they keep all of the branding. This gives it a very clean and discrete look that a lot of people are into.

Here is a nice breakdown of what ACX is all about. As you can see, EVGA designed the ACX cooling with a small wall of heatsink fins in between the two fans to keep turbulence down. This should help keep noise down as well as make for more efficient cooling. Another key feature is the double ball bearing design in each of the fans. This is important again for keeping the noise as low as possible while extending the life of the fans as well.

EVGA also did a good job of making sure you can look and see what card you have as well. A lot of companies don’t include any markings on the top edge or when they do it’s something general like their brand. It’s nice to be able to show off the specific card. In this case everything can be found on the top edge as well as on the middle of the side of the card. Both locations are easy to see when looking but don’t stand out to much that it might take away from the look of the card in your pc.

Just like the GTX 770 ACX, the EVGA GTX 760 Superclocked w/ACX is an open air design. Its most obvious on the end where it is completely open but there are also openings along the bottom of the card as well. This mean that hot air being blown off the card will be pushed into your case not all out the back like the reference design. This leaves more room for better cooling, but if your case hardly has any cooling this will add to the heat on your motherboard, cpu, and hard drives.

On the flip side, things are equally as interesting. If you remember, the reference card uses a short PCB design while this card has a full length PCB. If you look closely you can see that the power connections are basically in the same spot, they just used the additional PCB space to spread things out a little and most importantly they did this to include support mounting holes for the ACX cooling.

Just like the reference card the EVGA GTX 760 Superclocked w/ACX does have two SLI bridge connections; this means the cards support triple SLI if you need to expand in the future.

The rear slot of the EVGA GTX 760 Superclocked w/ACX does have the high flow bracket that flows a lot more air than the stock slot cover. They were able to do that by opening up every vent even larger with small sections of metal between them. They also added slots above the DVI slots and around the DisplayPort and HDMI connections. Speaking of, for connections you still get the same dual DVI, HDMI, and Displayport connections that we have seen for the past few years. Only one of the DVI ports will support a DVI to VGA adapter as well.

For power connections the reference card required two six pin cables while this card needs a six pin and an eight pin, I would guess that the 170 TDP of the reference card was pushing things a little and EVGA wanted to make sure there was enough power for the overclocked card.

When you put the reference card next to the EVGA GTX 760 SC ACX we can really see how much better it looks. This is a great looking card and the two large fans help both with its performance and its styling. Size wise the EVGA card takes up the same amount of space although as we saw before the PCB is considerably longer than the reference design.

Our Test Rig and Procedures

Cooling, Noise, and Power

Well we already knew what the reference GTX 760 would pull under load but even though the EVGA GTX 760 Superclocked w/ACX has the same TDP I had a feeling it would pull a little more with its overclock and dual fans pulling more power. Interestingly enough it pulled 11 watts more, just three watts less than the GTX 670 did when I tested it earlier this month. Oddly enough though, idle power was a tick less than the reference design, I’m guessing that the improved cooling pulls a little less power at idle because it doesn’t need to spool the fans up as much.

When it came to our noise testing, I was really hoping to see a big improvement over the reference card. I mean in the image that EVGA provided that shows off the ACX coolings features, a big portion of the design was focused on noise output with things like the dual ball bearing fans and a design that prevents the two fans from creating turbulence. Because of that I was a little surprised when the numbers at 100% fan speed show this card to be slightly louder than stock. What it comes down to though is the ACX cooling doesn’t need to run at 100% fan speed, so during every day use its going to be quieter, even though our tests don’t really show that.

Speaking of that, part of keeping everything quiet is a design that runs cool so the fans don’t need to run as fast. After running the GTX 760 SC ACX through Unreal Heaven Benchmark 4.0 my results had the card considerably cooler than the reference design but also oddly enough it was warmer than the GTX 770 with the same cooling. This could be related to the higher clock speeds over the GTX 770 though, or it is possible that EVGA has adjusted their cooling profile a little.

Synthetic Benchmarks

I didn’t talk about it too much before, but the GTX 760 Superclocked w/ACX is an overclocked card as the name implies. A stock GTX 760 comes with a base clock of 980 Mhz and a boost clock of 1033 Mhz while this card’s base clock is faster than the reference boost clock at 1072 Mhz and its boost clock is 1137 Mhz. That means although we have a good idea of how it should perform just by going off our previous numbers, we get to see how the GTX 760 will perform with a healthy overclock. As you can see in 3DMark Fire Strike for example, the overclock gave the GTX 760 a nice bump in performance. It meant the difference between coming in behind the GTX 670 and with the overclock coming in ahead of it. The extra boost also helped push this card up closer to the performance we saw from the HD 7970 when I retested in earlier this month, I don’t think you could ask for any more performance from a card that is more than few steps down from the top of Nvidia’s current cards.

In Game Benchmarks

Okay so the GTX 760 Superclocked w/ACX performed well in our synthetic benchmarks, big whoop right? If you are reading this you are more curious how well it pushed the games in our benchmark suite. Well in most of our tests the GTX 760 Superclocked w/ACX pulled in a few extra fps over the GTX 760 reference card. That might not mean much in some games, but sometimes that can be the difference between smooth gameplay and a distracting low fps. More importantly, this is still a GTX 760, so you are basically getting this extra performance on the cheap over a reference designed card.

Overclocking

Well my overclocking on the reference card from Nvidia gave me was very impressive. But I was very interested in seeing how consistent my results would be. For one, the way they select the GPU’s for a card like the GTX 760 with some of the SMX cores turned off means they are able to use GPU’s that may have failed for other cards like the GTX 770. This is great for keeping prices down but sometimes this can lead to inconsistent overclocks from card to card. Going off our previous results I was able to start with a 200 Mhz GPU offset to save a little time. Interestingly enough though, the GPU clock speed with a 200 Mhz offset was 1215 Mhz. This was noticeably lower than what we saw with the reference card. In fact, when I continued on I wasn’t able to get any more out of the card with my only other pass result being a 215 Mhz offset with the same resulting speed.

When it came to memory tests my results were a little more promising than the GPU. After a little work I was able to bump it up to a memory offset of 525Mhz without experiencing any artifacts, glitches, or crashes. Of course going to 550 resulted in a catastrophic crash of both 3DMark and my display driver, so be careful to not push it too far. This gave me an end result of 3524Mhz or 7048 Mhz. Not bad at all!

In the end it is clear that not every card is going to perform consistently when it comes to overclocking with the GTX 760’s. It will be luck of the draw even more so than normal, but even so I was still able to get respectable results with this card. They just were not as impressive as with our reference card.

Overall and Final Verdict

Looking at an overclocked card is always interesting. I mean after seeing the performance of the reference card we already have our expectations set. Because of this sometimes checking out a card like the GTX 760 Superclocked w/ACX can be underwhelming, but I can say without a doubt that this isn’t one of those times. The reference GTX 760 left a little to be desired both in its cooling as well as styling. EVGA did a great job improving on both of those things. I think the ACX cooling of the EVGA GTX 760 Superclocked w/ACX is going to look great in any build without drawing to much attention as well. Even better yet was the boost in performance that I saw over the stock speeds with the GTX 760 Superclocked w/ACX’s overclock. The overclocked numbers inched close and sometimes beyond the performance of the GTX 670, at a considerably lower cost. Speaking of cost, this card is going to run you $259.99 at launch, $10 more than the reference card. For $10 you are getting much better cooling, styling, and a big boost in performance.

My only complaint about the card at all was that my overclocking results didn’t live up to the expectations that I saw with the reference card, but this is unrelated to the GTX 760 Superclocked w/ACX. The GTX 760 is just going to be hit and miss for overclocking. Anyhow, if you are on the market for a GTX 760, I would highly recommend picking up this card, considering the price over a stock card you really can’t ask for anything more. 

Author Bio

Author: garfi3ldWebsite: http://lanoc.org

Editor-in-chief

You might call him obsessed or just a hardcore geek. Wes's obsession with gaming hardware and gadgets isn't anything new, he could be found taking things apart even as a child. When not poking around in PC's he can be found playing League of Legends, Awesomenauts, or Civilization 5 or watching a wide variety of TV shows and Movies. A car guy at heart, the same things that draw him into tweaking cars apply when building good looking fast computers. If you are interested in writing for Wes here at LanOC you can reach out to him directly using our contact form.