If you are an avid reader, you have most likely seen countless Asus motherboard reviews and even a few audio products as well recently. Something that is a little rarer is having an Asus video card come through our office. When Asus contacted me asking if we wanted to take a look at their upcoming GTX 650 Ti DirectCU II TOP, there wasn’t even a hesitation. We have already taken a look at the reference GTX 650 Ti; this card on the other hand is nothing like it. Sure you have the same architecture, as you would expect. But the DirectCU II TOP is almost twice as long, has twice the cooling, and has a considerably different PCB even. It’s no off the shelf reference design, today we are going to dig in and see what all of that means for you when looking to buy a GTX 650 Ti.Cooling and Noise
Our experience with the reference GTX 650 Ti put the cards temperatures, after running through Furmark, right in the middle of all of our HD 7770’s. With the Asus card having what can only be described as extreme cooling with their DirectCU II being almost twice the length of the reference card, I was expecting good performance and I wasn’t disappointed. With a tempature of 49 degree’s, this is the second coolest card we have tested, only to the much lower TDP of the HD 7750. Asus focused on the cooling and it shows in its performance.
As for noise, two fans do make more noise than one fan. Idle noise was a bit higher than the reference card, but still what most would consider silent when placed in an enclosed case. During testing, the noise level never went up, the DirectCU II cooling kept things so cool that turning up the fan speed was never needed.
