Even now that the GTX 750 Ti isn’t the only Maxwell cards on the market, I still find them an interesting GPU. Some of you may remember from our launch coverage of the GTX 750 Ti that it packed a punch without ever needing an extra power connection. Well that was the reference design; many of the other models on the market sadly required a 6-pin power connection for their overclocked models. Well Asus sent over their Strix OC Edition of the GTX 750 Ti and low and behold, it has the same low power requirements as the reference design. Today I’m going to put it through our test suite and see what a little overclock does for the Maxwell powered GTX 750 Ti.

Product Name: Asus GTX 750 Ti Strix OC Edition

Review Sample Provided by: Asus

Written by: Wes

Pictures by: Wes

Packaging

Asus is always fairly consistent with their GPU packaging. For ROG cards they always come in that ROG red and mainstream cards have the glowing claw marks on a metal looking background. Beyond the background Asus included a nice drawing of the Strix cooling on the cover. Down along the bottom are a few key features like the memory capacity and the 0dB fan. On the right side you have Nvidia green highlighting the Geforce GTX 750Ti logo. Around on the back of the packaging there is a lot more going on. For starters Asus included an actual photo of the card to give you a peak of what is inside. There is a line drawing of the display connections as well as notes on what each does. Then they highlighted three features (Their DirectCU II 0dB Fan, Super Alloy Power, and GPU Tweak) and show a photo along with a short explanation on why each is important.

Inside the box the card sits in a cutout in foam with the drive disc and installation guide sitting on top. The card is of course wrapped up in a static protective bag as well. Beyond that there is nothing else that comes with the 750Ti Strix. The reason for this is because normally we would see power cable adapters but the lack of any power connection means we don’t have anything to adapt too.

Card Layout and Photos

Asus’s new Strix series of cards shares a lot with their other cards including DirectCU II cooling but with new fans, fan shrouds, and simple tribal like artwork on the cards. Strix cards are overclocked cards that also support Asus’s 0bd Fan Tech that turns the fans off when they aren’t needed to keep things quiet. Asus stuck with the same red and black theme that has always done well for them with the GTX 750 Ti Strix. The card itself doesn’t have any power connections or SLI bridge connections so there are a few less photos than normal but that is simply because there is less to cover. The fan shroud on the 750 Ti Strix has an interesting octagon shape around the fans where normally we would see circles, I’m curious how that will effect fan noise, but I will find that out in my testing.

Looking around the heatsink in the photos below we can get a much better idea of how Asus’s Strix cooling works. Up top we can see two heatpipes that pull the heat from the GPU out to under each of the fans. The heatsink has an interesting mushroom design that should also help the heat transfer from the GPU area out onto the fins under the two fans. This design is also completely open, so the hot air coming off of the card will blow out the top, bottom, and both sides. At the end of the card we can see how the heatsink actually extends past the cards PCB. With the right side fan blowing down right in that area that will be the most efficient part of the card, there should be very little resistance for the airflow.

Even though the cooling design for the 750 Ti Strix doesn’t really blow air out of the back PCI slot I still love the huge openings for ventilation Asus put here. There is hardly any material in between each opening. For connections you get a single DVI, full sized DisplayPort, and full sized HDMI. This should cover almost anything you will need unless you need two DVI’s, if so you will need to invest in an HDMI to DVI cable.

On the flip side of the card, we can get a much better look at the all black PCB. This also helps you see just how much longer than heatsink is than the actual card.

Our Test Rig and Procedures

Synthetic Benchmarks

Before I dig into the in game performance of the GTX 750 Ti Strix I ran it through a few synthetic benchmarks to see how well it performed. I don’t expect it to be anywhere close to its Maxwell big brother the GTX 980, I was curious how well the overclock that Asus gave it would perform. For reference, the Strix has a GPU Boost Clock of 1202 MHz and a memory clock of 5400MHz. The reference GTX 750 Ti had the same memory clock but was slightly lower on the GPU side with a boost clock of 1085 MHz. Asus gave the card a bump of 117MHz, how would this translate in performance? Well In 3DMark Fire Strike using the performance setting it pushed the score from 4131 to 4483, an impressive bump! With the extreme setting there was a similar jump in performance as well.

1080p In-Game

For in game performance I ran the GTX 750 Ti Strix through both our 1080p and 1440p testing. Being a budget card the 1440p testing doesn’t apply as much because typically people at this price point are running at 1080p or lower. At 1080p I ran the 750 Ti Strix through 10 different games, each with their settings turned all of the way up including AA. How well did it perform? Well out of the 10 games (Thief results are on the next page) three games had an average FPS over 60 with it reaching an impressive 105 in F1 2013. The GTX 750 Ti Strix had four games that in between 30 and 60 FPS with Bioshock being the closest to 60 at 51.34. Then there were three under 30 FPS with the lowest being 10 FPS in Thief. Generally anything over 30 FPS is playable and over 60 FPS is ideal. All 10 games would be more than playable if you take the time to tweak the settings a little, specifically turning the AA down because it hits budget cards extremely hard. Across the board when compared to the reference design the overclock on the Strix helped it pull a nice improvement. Sometimes overclocks only show with a few FPS here and there but in F1 2013 for example I saw an improvement of 8 FPS, not bad!

1440p In-Game

As I said before, 1440p isn’t really what the GTX 750 Ti Strix was designed to play at. As a whole, I have been impressed with the performance of some of the mid-range cards at this resolution, so I went ahead and tested at it to see where it stands. Even with the settings turned all the way up Bioshock Infinite was still more than playable. As always, Thief baffled me with its 1440p results mirroring the 1080p tests as well.

Cooling, Noise, and Power

The reference GTX 750 Ti came in to our Cooling, Noise, and Power testing and really impressed me with its performance so I had high hopes when testing the GTX 750 Ti Strix. What makes a Strix card special is because they actually focused on low noise output, the biggest thing they did to support this was designing the card to run cool enough at low power usage that the fans actually can turn off. This explains the results I saw when I did the first test, power usage. At idle the GTX 750 Ti Strix pulled less power than any other card on our charts. This includes the original GTX 750 Ti, beating it by 5 watts. This helped I’m sure by the fans turning off. Under load it was the second lowest card tested, 8 watts lower than the reference design. This is especially interesting because the Strix actually has a fairly nice overclock and was noticeably faster than the reference card in my testing.

Moving on to the noise testing, I ran the GTX 750 Ti Strix through the same test three times, once at idle, the next at 50% fan speed, and the third with the fans turned all the way up to 100%. This way I can get a good idea of noise levels through any use. The most noticeable thing is obviously the lack of an idle result. As I mentioned before, at low power usage the fans actually turn off and this includes at idle. When testing with the fans manually turned on I was still just as impressed. The Strix doesn’t best the reference design, but the reference design only had a single fan where the Strix does have two fans. It still came in second with impressive numbers.

In my last test I run Heaven Benchmark 4.0 on loop until I get a stable temperature and document it. The GTX 750 Ti Strix was down near the bottom of the charts with an impressive 57 degrees. I should also note that while the fans were on during this testing, they were running at less than 50% fan speed at most making this a very quiet run as well.

Overall and Final Verdict

While I would personally be looking for a little more performance to be able to push the higher resolutions, the GTX 750 Ti Strix put up impressive numbers. This was even more impressive when you take into account its power and cooling numbers. Asus was actually able to outperform the reference GTX 750 Ti both in all of the in-game and synthetic benchmarks as well as power usage and temperature testing. Then when you look at the noise testing, how do you get quieter than silent? I tried really hard to find any nitpick about the card at all for our cons section but frankly it’s just a great card. The only downside at all is its current price point, the other GTX 750 Ti’s have dropped and price and even have rebates but this card seems to of slipped through the cracks. Hopefully Asus checks that out and adds it to the rebates, because this is a perfect card for a budget build or an upgrade to a store bought PC that doesn’t have the power supply to be able to support a higher end video card. 

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.